


An Angel's Elegy

by webcricket



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Acceptance, Angst, Choices, F/M, Father Figures, Heartbreak, Hope vs. Despair, Love, Nephilim, Original Character Death(s), Protective Dean Winchester, Redemption, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-04-24 12:44:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14355789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/webcricket/pseuds/webcricket
Summary: A five-act series charting Castiel’s grief after losing the reader in childbirth. Despite her death, the reader remains an integral part of the story.An anguishing journey about the intertwining of love and loss - adrift in a sea of grief and self-blame after losing his love, Castiel abandons hope. Leaving his newborn Nephilim daughter to the care of the Winchesters, he seeks absolution for your death at any cost. Will he ever find his way home?





	1. Act I

_Father forgive me,_ Castiel prays, clutching the soulless husk of your body to his chest _._ Through the deafening cracks of his vessel’s fracturing heart, he becomes vaguely aware of the sputtering wet cries of your newborn daughter flooding the room – his daughter. _What I’ve done, it’s unforgivable,_ he rebukes himself, throat bobbing in a thick swallow of guilt.

“She’s…she’s gone, Cas. Let her go,” Dean’s gruff voice echoes hollow in his ears, demanding the angel’s attention with increasing insistence. “Your daughter needs you. Cas-”

“No,” Cas growls. Through a haze of desperate tears, the angel recognizes and ignores the looming figure of Sam in his periphery trying to push a loosely swaddled pink-flushed wriggling infant into his unwilling embrace. “Y/N, please-,” pleading, he smooths his fingertips tenderly across your forehead to sweep aside the sweat-dampened hair gathered on your brow. Cradling your cheeks, he wills you to look at him, “- _please_.”

“Sammy.” Dean flattens a palm to his brother’s shoulder, barring his efforts.

Sam’s dazed regard shifts between Dean’s grief-stricken greens, the crying babe, and the unresponsive angel.

“Not now,” Dean mouths, reaching out to take the child in his arms. “Give him space.”

Sam’s lip quivers. “Yeah, yeah sure.” He bites the quavering flesh to immobilize it. Relieved of the delicate burden of care for the creature you charged him with delivering safely into the world, emotion brims to streak his cheeks. Allowing the magnitude of what happened to sink in and seep free, he weaves his useless hands through his hair and knots them behind his neck.

“Shh, sweetheart,” Dean coos, rocking and pacifying the girl as he and Sam move toward the door, “everything will be alright. I promise.” He says it to her as much as he says it aloud to convince himself, his brother, and his inconsolable friend.

The angel perceives no solace in the remark. It’s not the Nephilim born into this world, her very conception a testament to the power of his love for you, which anguishes him now. Rather, it’s the knowledge that by loving you purely with every atom of his celestial being and giving in to his weakness by succumbing to that forbidden temptation named love, he doomed you to this fate. He condemned you the instant his eyes first alit upon you, sky blue irises churning in wonder to encounter so beautiful a soul. He understood too late why love was not meant for angels.

Grace exhausted in attempt after failed attempt to revive you, he begins to shake you. Fraught fingers fumble to set your limbs in motion. The calloused pad of his thumb brushes over your pale lips, caressing the curve of your cooling cheek to hook your chin, tilting you to face him – as if these gentle actions might rouse you from a deep slumber. Staring into the glazed far off focus of your unblinking eyes, your dull gaze looking toward horizons where he cannot follow, he shivers to see the emptiness of expression where once shone a warmth and brilliance to rival the sun. You promised him everything would be okay. He wanted to believe you. He held on to your unyielding faith and bravery those too brief happy months of the pregnancy right up until your life ebbed and slipped like water through his fingers.

The murmuring of a grief-stricken guttural growl stirs in his lungs and erupts into a deafening cry aimed at the heavens. The sound of your angel’s heart breaking quakes the foundations of the bunker, fissuring the reinforced concrete walls and shattering windows as the shockwave assails upward to reverberate utter grief upon the pearly gates of Heaven itself.

_Dean,_

_If you’re reading this, well…_

_We defied the odds so many times, but this time I knew where I was going. I knew the risk and I accepted my fate because she’s worth it. This is my ending, but it’s also a beginning. This life growing stronger inside of me day-by-day – she’s beautiful. I feel her goodness in my heart. Her light will save the world. There’s no darkness anymore; no shadow of doubt – I’m filled only with hope._

_You’re a good man, Dean Winchester. You and Sam, you’re the best men I know. I’m fortunate to call you brothers. I know this is too much to ask of you both. I’m asking anyway because I must. There is no one else I trust with this task. No one who would understand. No one more capable of seeing this through than you two amazing idjits._

_Dean, please take care of my girl and my angel. No matter what happens next, I know you will always listen to your heart and do what’s right by both of them. Protect her with your life. Love her as your own. Raise her to be as strong and sentimental as Sammy and as selfless and stubborn as you. Don’t let her forget I believe in her and love her with all my heart._

_And my angel – Dean, Castiel will be so lost. He tries to keep a brave face, but when he thinks I’m not looking I see the fear and pain in his eyes. All the love in his heart, it’s not enough to save me and I know he blames himself. With me gone, he’ll be searching for answers. Answers you won’t be able to give him. Answers he may destroy himself and others in search of. Answers he will never find until he forgives himself._

_He needs you, Dean. Try to be patient with him. Give him room to grieve. Time to understand and to remember. He’s angry with himself, and you know all too well that’s the worst kind of anger. Remind him that I love him, that I don’t regret a single minute. He’s my happiness, and this miracle we created with our love – I’ve never wanted anything else._

_What he needs now is Hope. Dean, you and Sam – you hold on to that hope for him until he finds his way home._

_Love Always, Y/N_

The handwritten letter gripped between Dean’s fingertips flutters to the table, his attention drawn to the hasty footsteps clanging on the iron of the map room stairs. Rising from his seat in the library and crossing to the threshold overlooking the room, he sees Castiel wrenching the door handle at the top of the landing. “Where are you going?” he asks, cadence coarse as he sniffles back the fresh flow of tears prompted by the discovery of your note.

The angel pauses, allowing the door to swing shut. Chin falling to his chest, he doesn’t turn to look at his friend as he speaks. “Away, Dean,” he mutters, barely loud enough for Dean to discern. “There’s nothing in this place for me but her memory.”

“You think Sam and I aren’t thinking about her every single minute? That we aren’t hurting and missing her, too?”

“It’s different.”

“How?” Dean ascends the first several steps.

“She’s gone because of _me_. Because _I_ dared to love her.”

“Cas, you have a beautiful little girl that needs you here. She needs her father.”

“I’m not fit to be anyone’s father.”

Dean’s muscles seize in an upwelling of resentment; his already red-rimmed eyes discoloring further in the crimson hue of rage as his blood pressure spikes. Cas struck a chord – the Winchester has had more than enough of making excuses for absentee fathers to last one lifetime and he will tolerate no more. He bounds up the remaining stairs by twos, growling and grabbing a fistful of beige trench coat to spin the angel around where he stands. “It’s been two days. Two days!” he roars, breath bellowing hot against the angel’s expressionless aspect. “I get it, I do. You’re grieving. But you haven’t even looked at her, Cas! She’s your daughter! You don’t get to walk away from this – from her. I won’t let you.”

Two days, or an eternity; it all feels the same to the angel. Entombed in that moment, he relives those fateful minutes in the staggering quality of detail only a celestial mind can conjure. For all his promises and power, again and again he’s helpless to stanch the ebb of life from your body. Each time he blinks he sees the bright flicker and fade of light in your eyes and the glimmer of a smile ghosting your mouth upon hearing your daughter’s healthy cries. Over and over he hears that final wilting wisp of breath flutter past your parted lips – his name on your tongue in an unfinished utterance.

He refused to let you go even when there was no longer anything corporal to hold. A numb sentinel beside your hunter’s funeral pyre, sky blackened by smoldering wood and bone, acrid air permeated the fabric of his clothes and crept in to begrime the very core of his celestial being until there was no escape for his senses. What remained of you charred and flew upward in flame – upward to a Heaven where he is not welcome to tread. His fiery devotion diminished to smoke and ashes beneath his fingertips.

“Are you hearing me?” Dean jerks roughly at the angel’s coat collar.

In response Cas slams his palm to Dean’s chest, hurling him against the wall with a sickening crunch.

Dean doubles over coughing, sputtering flecks of blood, the wind knocked out of his lungs, several ribs broken.

“Everything I touch turns to ash.” No longer apathetic, anger bristling, fury gleaming white hot in his piercing blues, Cas strides forward to grasp Dean’s shoulder, forcing him upright and stooping to search his strained face. His teeth and jaw grind, punctuating every gritty word. “Everything and everyone. Do you understand?”

Snatching at Cas’ arm for a handhold, gasping for every shallow stab of air punching through his ribcage, the hunter teeters and spits crimson in the struggle to stay on his feet. “Cas-”

The angel’s vice-grip clamps deeper until Dean yelps and his knees buckle. Lip snarling, Cas lets go with a shove, warning, “Do not try to stop me again.”

“Cas, don’t-” Dean manages to choke, reaching out to catch at the hem of Cas’ swaying coat.

Cas slips away from his grappling fingers. Forcefully heaving the door wide, the metal screams in protest, straining on the hinges.

“Cas!” Dean gasps again, crawling after him. He collapses against the door jamb as a violent spasm of coughing accosts him. He kneels there, too incapacitated to intervene as he watches Cas’ retreat.

 _“Try to be patient with him,”_ your words resound in Dean’s ears, so near and so real his gaze darts sideways searching for you in the empty air.

“Patient my ass,” Dean snorts and wipes the trickle of blood from his mouth.

“Dean? Are you in here?” Sam’s voice drifts upward.

Dragging himself to his feet and staggering to the railing, leaning on it for support, Dean glares down at his brother. “What?” he rasps.

Sam carries your daughter, awkwardly extended at arm’s length, scrutinizing the diaper and onesie he simultaneously succeeded in putting on backward. “Something doesn’t seem right here.” He peers up at the landing, brow knotting in concern at Dean’s battered condition.

“That’s for damn sure.” Dean presses a hand to his bruised ribcage and hobbles down the stairs.

“What the heck happened to you?”

“Cas left,” Dean grunts. “I tried to get between him and the door.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Dean slumps into the nearest chair. “Hey, you can’t keep holding her like that, give her to me. Like this-” He lays her to his chest. “There we go, sweetheart. Uncle Dean’s got you. That’s better, eh?”

Already larger than a newborn should be, she bobs her head up from the flannel of his shirt to blink bright blue eyes at Dean and burble happily.

“She needs contact. Needs to know we’re here. That she’s loved,” Dean explains, rubbing a small circle into her back. “Ya gotta talk to her, Sam. Tell her everything’s okay.”

“Dean-”

“I know, Sammy. I know,” Dean stops Sam from saying what they’re both thinking – that there’s a chance Cas isn’t coming back, that everything is as far from okay as it gets. Coping skills set by default to maximum brood, he believes dwelling on the potential aloud is pointless. “When was the last time she ate?”

Sam runs a hand over his exhaustion-lined face and through his uncharacteristically unkempt hair. “I, uh, I thought you were making a formula run.”

“Right. Time for plan B.” Dean fishes the Impala’s keys from his pocket and tosses them at his brother. Crinkling his nose, he adds, “Better grab some more diapers while you’re at it.”

“Yeah, yeah, more diapers, check.” Sam yawns and aims his weary frame in the general direction of the garage mumbling to himself about whether fully human babies go through as many diapers in a single day as this child.

“And pie!” Dean shouts after him.

Without turning around, Sam weakly waves in acknowledgement.

A faint smile contours Dean’s lips. “Wait’ll you get your first taste of pie, princess. You’re gonna love the stuff.” Kissing the fuzzy crown of her head, his nose lingers, inhaling the perfume of her skin – soft and sweet and so reminiscent of you. “Your momma sure did. Maybe more than me, and that’s saying something. Couldn’t get enough blueberry pie with you growing in her belly. She’d sit right over there in that chair-” His regard flits to the seat occupied by a favorite fleece blanket of yours and his smile withers. He keeps talking through the scratch of sorrow thickening his throat, because if he can keep on talking maybe the bunker won’t feel quite so empty. Maybe with enough words he can cushion this innocent life he holds from the hurt. “Right _there_ , swiveling and shoveling that gooey crumbly goodness straight from the tin by heaping forkfuls. She had Cas running all over Kansas night and day just to get more pie. And your daddy, he-” Dean’s lids squeeze shut with the effort required to will away the coarseness coloring his tone. Not completely stifling his bitterness over the angel’s desertion, he exhales a long sigh. “Well I guess he loves her more than anything else in this world, doesn’t he?”

She begins to fuss.

“Okay, okay. You’re right. Everything’s gonna be alright.” Readjusting his support, he soothingly bounces her despite the searing pain radiating through his ribs and the worry burdening his thoughts. “He just needs a little more time.”


	2. Act II

_“Hey kiddo.” Dean pinches and massages the exposed skin of your sweat-slick neck where you sit, groaning and hunched, over a mug of tea at the bunker’s kitchen table. The piquant scent of ginger steeping in the liquid smacks his senses from where he stands and he surmises exactly where and how you spent your morning. “You still worshipping the porcelain goddess? Cause if you are, we gotta find you a new religion real fast.”_

_“It’s nothing,” you mumble into your sleeve. Breath reflectively reeking to fill your nostrils, stomach acid tickling your throat, you do your best to ride out a renewed wave of nausea._

_“Nothing?” he asks._

_“Mm-hmm,” you affirm._

_Swinging a bowed leg over the seat, he settles onto the stool beside you. Perching an elbow on the tabletop, he props his chin up to objectively survey your miserable form. After the briefest of internal deliberations regarding the appropriateness of broaching the delicate topic, he dispels any qualms on the subject of the conceivably ‘no vacancy’ status of your womb and speaks, “Not to be blunt, but it’s been almost two weeks. Have you considered the notion that this may have nothing to do with the blue plate surf ‘n turf special you ate at Vinnie’s Diner? I mean, even bad shrimp isn’t this bad.”_

_You have considered the notion. At length. And you’ve settled firmly on denial as a plan of action – not that this strategy is necessarily working, but Castiel isn’t due back until tonight and you can’t begin to think about the scope of this properly without him. “No,” you lie. At least you’re sticking to your plan._

_“Y/N-”_

_“It’s not possible.” You’re a hunter. He’s an angel. Both of you societal outliers in tenuous orbit around every impending apocalypse and new and improved big bad. It wouldn’t be right; no matter how wonderful the thought, or how many times you’ve dreamt of creating a family, it wouldn’t be right bringing a life into this messed up world where the path, moment to moment, is so uncertain – where everything could all come crashing down around you in the span of a single heartbeat._

_“Oh honey, if the sounds Sammy and I are subjected to from behind closed doors when Castiel is around are any indication, I’d say it’s not only entirely possible but also very probable.” He smirks, trying to lighten the mood. “I told the guy his angel blade doesn’t count as protection. The way you two go at it like rabbits. I’m surprised this didn’t come up sooner.” His diversional tactic doesn’t work except to demolish your hormonally fragile defenses._

_You feel a prick of tears stinging your eyes. “Dean, I-,” your voice cracks, “I’m scared.”_

_He wraps an arm around your shoulders and draws you flush to his chest. Rubbing tactile reassurances into your back as you sob against him, he murmurs into your hair, “I know. I know, sweetheart. I got you though, you hear? And that stubborn pain in the ass angel? He loves you more than anything. We’re in this together. No matter what, okay?”_

_“Yeah?” you sniffle into his flannel shirt and peer up into his sincere greens._

_“Yeah.”_

_“Thank you, Dean.” You peck a kiss to his cheek and exhale a relieved sigh._

_Nose flaring when your morning sick breath fans his face, he grimaces. “Ugh, you smell worse than Sam does after a run!” He continues to grip you tight in spite of any repulsion for your stinky state, contemplatively musing, “Like a ginger tea porta potty.” Reaching up to collect the wetness on your cheeks with a thumb, he grins wide when you smile. “There’s my girl.”_

_Clutching his hand and pressing your face into his palm, you manage a hoarse giggle._

* * *

“Duma, you must allow me passage.”

The shrill laughter of Castiel’s kin rings out into the air, piercing the nighttime quietude of the playground. “Castiel,” his fellow angel sneers, “it appears you’ve developed quite the sense of humor squandering your divine purpose amongst humanity all these years.”

“I see no humor in my request.” His mouth tenses in an anxious line, tongue worrying the pale pink shell of his lower lip. He bows his head in a demonstration of contrition. Heaven’s doorstep is the last place he wants to be, and at the same time, the very place his fractured heart compels him to be.

“Really?” His sister’s unrestrained delight gleams in the grin of her vessel – lips peeled taut over her teeth in righteous ridicule. “Because it sounded to me like you just demanded safe passage into Heaven.”

“I did.” He lifts his chin and squares his shoulders, muscles stiffening in response to her disdain. Flexing his fingers into fists, he feels the bolstering weight of the angel blade tucked up his coat sleeve; a reflexive defiance narrows his gaze.

One angel will not block his path. He might bend her will; if not with persuasion, then by force. But she is not alone; two more angels maintain a wary distance when they step out from the shadows behind him.

Appearance dour, Duma’s eyes spark dangerous and dark in the dim glow of lamplight illuminating the park. “The same Heaven you decimated not so long ago?” she bristles, emboldened by the presence of her brethren. “The one you selfishly betray to serve those mortal stains, the Winchesters?”

“Yes, _sister_ ,” he growls, knowing he will gain nothing by denying the truth of the past, “the same Heaven.” The same Heaven your soul inhabits. The same Heaven he must visit at any cost. He stands before his kin in ruin, fatalistic in his desire to look upon your soul once more. Already defeated, he has nothing more to lose.

“Oh, but brother,” she tisks, intake of breath a prolonged hiss. Revolving her back to him, flouting her superior authority given the circumstance, she muses, “It isn’t the same Heaven you remember at all.”

“Duma, please.” He pitches forward, halted by a firm grip seizing his shoulder and the heel of a boot simultaneously striking his calf and bending him to one knee. White hot celestial metal threatens to split the prickly flesh of his neck if he struggles.

She glares sideways, arms crossed, coolly regarding him, judging, “You’re no angel, Castiel. Not anymore. Some of us question whether you ever were at all. There’s _nothing_ for you in Heaven.”

But there is _someone_. Your name resounds in the thunderous broken beat of his heart; he feels it pulse the length of his limbs, choking his gullet as it climbs to throb at his temples and wetly pool in his eyes. He clamps his jaw to preclude himself from crying it out; the iron tang of blood coats his bitten tongue.

An astute angel, she reads his reticent reaction as a confession to the contrary and reconsiders her assertion, “Or perhaps there is?”

Gulping guilt, unshaven skin scraping on the celestially forged lethal edge of the weapon held to his throat, his eyes cast downward, instinctive in their avoidance of the painful truth.

She skulks toward him. Threading her fingers into his hair, grabbing a fistful of loose curls by the roots, she yanks his head backward, forcing him to meet her penetrating gaze. “Maybe you seek the soul of that woman? The hunter. The one you are so fond of.”  

His vessel strains against the torrent of grief erupting from within at her mention of you; a reflection of firelight simmers in his irises as the vision of your lifeless body consumed by flame blazes in his mind. The raw emotion of anguish rises unbidden and uncontainable to shudder his vessel.

Holding him fast, shrewdly perceptive of his surfacing pain and vulnerability, she stokes the smoldering remnants of the seraph’s heart. “I heard the rumors. I didn’t believe them. Not until now.” Inclining so near that the heat of her breath laps at his skin as she speaks, the question glides innocent yet incisive off her tongue. “Tell me, Castiel. What happened to her?”

A flicker of anguish contorts his fascia. _I happened!_ his mind screams out. His jaw quivers mutely. A muffled mournful mewling abrades his ears. The pungent odor of smoke and ash swirls to suffocate all else. Devastated by the rush of remembrance, the answer weakens his stoic resolve. He staggers under the weight, braced upright by the angel at his back.

Duma scrapes her nails into his scalp to compel an answer.

“I-I failed her,” he admits, telling her what she wants to hear and what he knows by the agony afflicting his heart to be true. Sadness dampens the dusky circles marring his melancholy countenance.

She snarls, “In the end you fail us all. It’s what you do.” Shoving him roughly, deeming him nonthreatening in his present state, she snaps her head, gesturing for her comrades to release him and make for the gate.

Backing off, giving him a wide berth as he fights to stand and stay balanced, the two angels circle around to the Enochian spell-etched sandbox and vanish in a spectacle of swirling purple light.

Trembling, Cas reaches out to catch Duma’s wrist as she turns to join them. “Allow me to speak to her one last time; then do what you will to me as penance for my transgressions. Imprison me, destroy me, I will atone for the wrongs I have reigned upon her and Heaven.”

A sadistic smirk twists her mouth. “Beg,” she simpers.

Expression grey and hollow, any vestiges of pride that remain disintegrating in the submission of the act, he collapses to his knees. Hands sinking into the gritty earth for support, as though he needs the handhold to keep from falling further than he already has from grace, he rocks backward. Sat suppliant on his heels, he turns up his sullied palms in surrender and peers up at her, tone somnolent. “Have mercy, sister,” he beseeches. “I’m begging you.”

Harshness softening, she extends a light touch to smooth his disheveled locks. “Look at you, Castiel. How far you’ve fallen. How fouled by humanity. How exhausted you must be by this relentless battle to yield yourself over to Heaven’s mercy.”

Eyes shimmering and wet, he feebly nods. “Please, please take me with you. Take me… _home_.” _To her_ , he swallows the rest of the words that rise up, _take me home, to her._

Lowering her slender frame to peer into his pallid features, a tender empathetic smile affects Duma’s face as she strokes his cheek with her fingertips. “You’ve suffered much, haven’t you, dear brother? An angel is not made to know this pain of love and loss.”

“I feel-” he professes, hesitating. “I-I _feel_. Father forgive me.”

“Yes, perhaps,” she relents, cupping his cheek, thumb smearing the brine of tears salting his skin. “Perhaps compassion is the correct course. Perhaps it is what Father would do.”

A shaky sigh of relief shivers his frame. Eyelids fluttering shut, your smiling mien manifests before him and can almost hear the laughter lighting up your eyes. It’s the summer day in the small park near the bunker you first said those three little words to him. The day he learned what the longing in his own heart meant. The day that forever altered the course of your lives. You materialize so near in his mind he might reach out to straighten the crooked halo of daisies ringing your wind-blown hair. Imagining you thus, he relaxes into Duma’s calming caress.

But her gentleness is false and fleeting, meant only to further wound him. “Perhaps _not_ ,” she spits, shattering his dream. Clawing at his jaw, streaks of crimson well in the wake of her nails. “This-”

Gaping in horror, the bleakness of the vacant park filling his vision, he recoils and topples backward onto the ground.

“ _This_ is your punishment!” She kicks the dirt and motions broadly around them. “To exist in exile here. Haunted by your failures. The love you feel for this woman, the pain too – it is forbidden. You break our most sacred oath, and for this indiscretion alone you deserve death. Be grateful I stay my hand, _brother_.” Sauntering backward into the whirling gate, she sentences him as it engulfs her, “ _There_ is your mercy, Castiel.”

Rolling to one side, he shields himself from the whoosh of leaf litter and sand smattering his fallen form as the gate seals behind her and any traces of the sigil granting access to Heaven are eradicated in her wake. Silence veils the park. Flattening his back to the ground, blues hazily filter beyond the vast black atmosphere of night. Trained toward the heaven denied him, he blinks numbly, the sting of sand and tears naught compared to the great void aching in his heart.

* * *

_“I’m pregnant.”_

_An emotion verging on panic churns in the angel’s aspect. Color draining from his cheeks, his gaze falls from your nervous but elated smile to where your palm rests over your belly. It’s then he allows the foreboding niggling at his angelic senses this past month that something about you seemed different the acknowledgement it’s been wanting all along. “No,” he states, as if denying the life he kindled inside of you – the life consuming you – would somehow change the truth of it. No, he thinks, even as the rapid beating of your daughter’s heart assails his ears. No._

_“It’s true.” Your smile falters at his disquiet reaction. You exhibit a handful of positive pregnancy tests as proof. “Dean picked them up for me today. He had a hunch. You know Dean and his hunches, right? I wanted to wait until you came home, but-,” you ramble, filling the uncomfortable vacuum between you with whatever words sprout upon your tongue, “-I suppose patience isn’t one of my virtues, is it? I’ve had morning sickness since just after you left to meet up with Jack.” In nervy compulsion, your fingertips dance across his chest and fret at the buttons of his shirt. “Cas?”_

_Inside, he’s crumbling. The creation of a Nephilim requires inconceivable power. Power on par with the likes of the devil and the archangels or God himself; a power Castiel did not believe he possessed as a simple seraph. He did not understand the enormous power contained in the sentiment of love – nor did he comprehend the pure and untapped potential of this love when wielded by an angel flawed by too much heart. He was careless at the cost of your life. He outstretches an unsteady hand to touch your stomach._

_You catch him halfway, squeezing your fingers over his own and lifting the hem of your shirt to flatten his broad palm into the softness of your flesh._

_Eyelids drooping, all he can see is the replayed memory of his tentative hand resting on Kelly’s bulging belly. Though not his progeny, Jack spoke to him then. Gave him reassurances. Settled his trepidation. Forged an unbreakable bond. Yet this child within you, his child, is silent._

_For all their connection and her power, she is unable to traverse the expanding emptiness shrouding her father’s heart at the thought of losing you. She cannot reassure him this is a beginning, not an end. She cannot show him the radiant gladness and love shining upon her from within your soul. She wills you to speak for her, to give him the comfort she cannot._

_Your lips part, voice quavering, “Cas, everything…everything’s going to be okay.”_

_Lashes heavy, his focus resolves on your anxiously searching eyes. In them he sees bravery; Kelly’s bravery, too, shone much like yours. And now she’s gone, because for all his power, love, and goodness, Jack could not save his mother from her death upon bringing him into this world and neither could the angel. It will be no different for you._

_“Angel, say something. Please.”_

_“It’s a girl,” he says, deflecting his unquelled surge of terror with a statement meant to distract you._

_“A girl!” you squeal. Joy crinkling at your nose and eyes, you leap to throw your arms around him. “Oh, my angel-”_

_He burrows his chin into the delicate skin of your neck. Yes, your angel. Always. As you are his; but no matter how close he holds you now, he feels you slipping away._

* * *

Gazing out the dingy windshield toward the playground and Heaven’s bolted entrance, Castiel ignores the insistent rhythmic buzz of the cell phone vibrating on the passenger seat cushion of his truck. The sky above brightens in the violet-orange hue characteristic of the dawn. He scarcely perceives this day’s light; his mind is anchored in another sunrise – your final one.

He can feel the interlocking of your fingers through his own, filling the gaps, giving him something to hold on to. He remembers the weight of your sleep-mussed head lolling to his shoulder, the warmth of your burgeoning belly and body nestled to his torso as you huddle on the roof of the bunker on a whim awaiting daybreak. He doesn’t know yet it will be your last day together.

_“You ever wonder what a sunrise is, angel?”_

He shakes his head as he did then, a compact smile shaping his mouth. It’s not because he hasn’t thought about it or that he dismisses the notion as trivial; rather, he delights in hearing your meditations on such topics.

_“I think it’s a promise fulfilled. A beginning born from darkness. The light is hope.”_

Of the opinion the bulk of his Father’s creations are rarely so complex, the angel wordlessly reasons maybe the cycle represents nothing, it being merely the revolution of a planet around a star. A star that one day will blister and die and consume the life it once nurtured. A means only to an inevitable end. Considering the optimistic smile aglow on your face, he humors you, says nothing, and simply nods.

_“No matter what happens, the sun always rises. Promise me you’ll remember that, angel.”_

You don’t say the words _when I’m gone_ ; he hears them nonetheless.

_“Castiel, please promise me…”_

A jolt judders his vessel at the vividness of the recollection. His fingers contract around the thin air. He glances to the space beside him. Growling and grabbing at the nettling cell, three letters pop up on the screen – _Sam_. He isn’t sure why he keeps the device turned on anymore. Or for that matter, charged. Or why he even bothers to keep it at all aside from habit. He sends the call to voicemail where Sam will be unable to leave a message in a mailbox already teeming with Dean’s collected alternating raving rants and plaintive pleas for Cas to _do the right thing_.

The angel briefly ponders stuffing the phone out of sight in the glovebox. Leaning across the seat to unlatch the cover, he decides instead to toss it out the open window. He no longer knows what the _right thing_ to do is and doesn’t need to be reminded of this fact – he lost sight of this and everything else when he lost you. The only thing, right or wrong, he can concentrate on is the objective of seeing you again. If Heaven won’t help him he’ll need a back door and, cranking the key in the ignition, he knows precisely where to go knocking.


	3. Act III

_“Sammy!”_

_A smile stretches across Sam’s features at the cheerful sound of your voice intruding on the sanctity of his studies. If he’s being honest, Mesoamerican lore as told and colorfully illustrated by Ancel Lemming, Men of Letters field researcher, is kind of a drag and an excuse for a break is welcome. Shoving the mountain of files aside, he pivots from his desk to look at you where you stand in the doorway to his bedroom. “What do you need?” he deadpans. You rarely call him Sammy with such a high degree of affection without a caveat attached._

_“What makes you think I need something?” You waddle into the room toward him, palm pressed to the bulging belly overhanging your striped yellow paint-stained pajama pants. Flecks of paint spatter your tank top, hair, and pregnancy aglow skin._

_“I know that tone. That’s your, ‘There’s a book I can’t reach on the top shelf rendition of Sammy!’”_

_“Hmm, well it just so happens-” You bop his nose playfully, eyebrows raising in amusement at the splotch of buttery gold left on his skin in the wake of your fingertip. “-I need someone tall dark and dreamy to fill in the gaps in the nursery’s paint job. I tried myself, but there’s this whole altered center of gravity thing happening in my mid-section that makes climbing a ladder next to impossible and since Cas and Dean are busy building the crib-”_

_“I’m your guy,” Sam interrupts your spiel._

_“I knew I could count on you!” You stretch an arm across his broad back to give him an awkward belly blocked hug. “FYI, they’ll probably need help with the crib when you’re done painting. Dean may be a wizard with a car engine, but knock-off IKEA furnishings, not so much. He’s on his fifth beer break while Cas insists on reading the instructions in each language and sorting out any discrepancies before proceeding.”_

_“Heh, uh, speaking of Cas.” Sam clasps your hand where it rests on his shoulder and squeezes it tight. Mood revolving 180 degrees, the smile fades from his face. He’s the only one of the lot to openly address your imminent demise and how you and the rest of them are dealing with it, or as seems to be the case, not dealing with it. You’re not surprised – Sam possesses a huge heart and as long as you’ve known him he has always been willing to tackle the emotional stuff no one else wants to confront. “How’s he, uh-”_

_“Coping with the fact we’ve got maybe another month if we’re counting correctly?” You rub your tummy when your daughter kicks in confirmation. It’s not easy for you to talk about your concern, but you’re glad he asked. The question is one constantly on your mind as your due date approaches. Nursery décor? Check. Sunny re-paint? Half check. Crib? Check-ish. Emotional status of the angel you love? Checked out._

_“Yeah.” Sam slides sideways in the chair so you have room to sit on his lap. “Here, get off those swollen ankles.”_

_You sigh a hum of thanks and settle down, laying your head in the hollow of his neck. “You know Cas, he doesn’t want to talk about it. I don’t think he ever will. Anytime I try to bring it up he finds a way to redirect. Yesterday he shushed me. With pie. Stuffed a forkful right in my mouth to shut me up. And dammit if it didn’t work. I think he’s just trying to keep it together. To be strong. For me.”_

_“That does sound like typical Cas.”_

_“Yeah, I guess it does,” you mumble._

_“Look, I’m not trying to defend the guy, but it seems like he’s trying.”_

_“He is – I mean, he’s being supportive; too supportive. He’s there and at the same time he’s distant. Like he’s going through the motions because I need him to.”_

_“And how are you doing?” Sam perches his chin on top of your head._

_You inhale and hold a deep breath which isn’t very deep on account of your rapidly growing daughter limiting the expansion of your diaphragm. Your confession brushes the flannel collar of his shirt when you softly speak, “I’m scared, Sam.”_

_“About dying?” he murmurs into your hair and snuggles you nearer._

_“No-” You shake your head, burrowing further into the comforting confines of his solid embrace. “–about what happens when I’m gone and Castiel doesn’t have me to hold on to anymore.”_

_“It’ll be hard, but he’ll have her.” Sam lays his palm to your stomach. “She’s part of you, a piece of you that will live on, and that’s something.”_

_“You know that, and I know that, but Cas, I’m afraid he-,” trailing off, throat thickening in sorrow, you close your eyes and tremble at the terrifying thought._

_“Y/N, he knows it too. I know what it looks like, him not wanting to talk about a situation none of us has the power to change, but somewhere behind that wall of angelic detachment, he knows and he’ll be okay. And maybe you’re right, maybe right now he thinks you need him to be strong for you. To keep whatever time you have left as normal and as happy as possible. He’s nothing if not protective of the people he loves and if he thinks avoiding the discussion is the right thing to do-”_

_“You really believe that, Sam?” You cut him off, sitting up to search his eyes for sincerity. “That he’ll be okay?”_

_“I do.” He reaches up to muss your hair, a smile simmering on his lips, lightening the atmosphere. “He’s going to be an amazing father. The minute he sees her it’ll all come together. She’s going to be everything you hope for and more.”_

* * *

“Come on Cas, pick up,” Sam mutters, fingers white-knuckling further into a fist with each unanswered ring. The stale ether of recycled air shrouding the library swallows his unheard prayer.

_Beep beep._ A cheery robotic feminine voice announces, “This user’s mailbox is full. _Goodbye_.”

Sam snorts and tosses his phone at the tabletop. Massaging the bud of frustration blooming at his temple, he considers trying the AWOL angel’s number again. He hesitates, the logical lobe of his brain arguing that repetition of the same action with the same failed result over and over is the very definition of foolishness. It’s his heart that hopes otherwise – the steady drum beat of _maybe_ _maybe_ pulsing his perception. It’s his heart burdened by the guilty belief that if only he’d tried harder to get Cas to hold his daughter on that fateful night, even just to look at her, to see how beautiful she is, how much she resembles you, that maybe the angel never would have left.

“I’m headed out.” Dean’s appearance at the library threshold temporarily sequesters the idealistic notion there exists a sliver of chance Cas might miraculously deign to answer on another attempt.

“Yeah, right,” Sam exhales, flipping the phone with a flick of a finger then covering the furtive action with a yawn and exaggerated stretching of his arms overhead.

Sam’s diversion is smooth, but not swift enough to prevent Dean from seeing the first few letters of Castiel’s name lighting up the screen. A minute muscular twitch undulates Dean’s lip into the semblance of a wolfish snarl. He digs a heel into the cement floor in an effort to contain the rise of anger reddening his neck. A growl gurgles in his throat and he sniffs sharp to subdue the sound.

Neither of the brothers is talking to the other about what happened or the fact it has been just shy of a month of radio silence since Cas disappeared and left them to care for your child. And although she’s not growing as precipitously fast as her half-archangel cousin Jack, her development outpaces human babies by leaps and bounds and Cas has already missed so much.

Dean avoids the subject because he can’t hear or speak or think his friend’s name without an associated display of belligerent agitation. As such outbursts about absent dads and mulling over missed milestones tend to inconsolably upset your daughter – an infant outgrown of her swaddling clothes and, though not yet walking, able to articulate her understanding and subsequent displeasure in a handful of babbled words – he summons the resolve to refrain and regularly shores up the reserves of his will with generous helpings of hard liquor and scathing sarcasm. He focuses now on the weight of the flask secured for travel in his coat pocket and bites his tongue.

Sam sees the bitterness awash in his brother’s aspect. He knows all too well where this road leads – not that there’s much he can do about it under the circumstances other than attempt to slow the tailspin. Arguing about what to do about Cas solves nothing.

You need them, your daughter needs them, and the errant angel needs them to hold it together. Not to mention the rest of the world, blithely unaware of the constant battle they fight against the supernatural to barely maintain the balance, wouldn’t even exist at present without them.

Whereas Sam internalizes his struggle, spends sleepless nights researching, runs to escape the self-blame arising at every turn and the unspoken accusation of _why didn’t you try harder_ he sees in the resemblance of your daughter’s innocent expression to yours, Dean prefers to default hell-bent on the path of physical destruction. They’re coping – keeping it together, on auto-pilot functionally, because there isn’t another option. Because it’s what they do best. Because you need them to, and so does _she_.

And in the round robin game of Nephilim nursemaid, the latest unconventional iteration of their life Dean likes to refer to as – _on today’s episode of…My Two Hunter Uncles_ – it’s Dean’s turn to work a case. The elder Winchester’s hatred for the shitty situation sustains in a directly proportional correlation of internal conflict to the fierce familial love he feels for your little girl.

Sam twists, wrapping an arm around the back of his seat, to disrupt his brother’s silent seething, “Don’t get dead out there, okay?”

Dean’s resentful scowl transitions into a weak smirk. “It’s Donna. What’s she gonna do, _dontcha know_ me to death?”

“You know what I mean.” Sam mimes a faint smile and puff of laughter for Dean’s benefit but feels no reassurance. He tries not to think about everyone he lost over the years and how that burden of loss feels. He tries not to think about how heart breaking it would be to have to explain to your daughter who lost so much the moment she took her first mewling breath that uncle Dean isn’t coming home. He breathes deep to quiet the fear.

“Ghoul grocery run, simple slash and burn, back in time for tomorrow’s bedtime story,” Dean verbally swats Sam’s concerns asunder.

Nothing in their world is ever _simple_. If it was simple, Donna wouldn’t have called for backup. Sam stays silent for the sake of avoiding the inevitable argument.

“So-” Dean readjusts the weight of the duffel on his shoulder and gestures toward the door. “Later then.”

“Yeah, later. Tell the girls I said hello. Call if you need anything.”

“You too.” An afterthought of action, Dean delves into his pocket. “Almost forgot.” Withdrawing a baby monitor, he tosses it in Sam’s lap. “She went down for a nap about 3 hours ago. She’ll be hungry soon. Remember, diaper then-”

“Dinner. Got it.” Sam’s hazel eyes roll. “You can’t hold that pumpkin puree incident over my head forever.”

“Can’t I?” The antic twinkle of Dean’s greens gleams genuine – a sparkle of himself flickering in the heavy haze of hurt.

“Go. I got this.” Sam cracks a compact optimistic grin as he watches Dean trundle off. Maybe everything _will_ be okay. _Maybe._ Maybe he should try the angel again. Sam stares ahead, forehead knotted at the thought. He waits until he hears the whirring mechanism of the garage outer door lock resound through the halls of the bunker before he picks up the phone. Before he can dial, his attention diverts to a familiar ballad crackling over the baby monitor. It’s not the first time your child has harnessed her kindling powers to switch on the record player.

A wistful smile dances upon his lips in recognition of the Bob Seger tune _Brand New Morning._ Dean used to sing the song to Sam to pass the long hours on dark nights so long ago – pre-paid stay run up, out of money and food, two kids kicked to the motel curb waiting for their father’s arrival. Always waiting and hoping and never talking about the shared fear. Sam didn’t realize how scared Dean must have been then that John wouldn’t come for them. How much strength it took for him, just a boy himself, to shield his younger brother from the painful potentials of reality. It’s not so different from what they’re both doing now. He closes his eyes and hums along, remembering the lyrics and the comfort.

_“It’s a brand new morning with a brand new sun,_  
And it’s just as warm for you as it is for everyone.  
Don’t just walk, come on, get it on, get on the run.  
It’s a brand new morning, ooh, it’s a brand new day.

_Forget the past now, it’s an ancient history._  
It’s a time to be reborn, it’s a time for being free.  
Someone might be waiting here outside where you can see -  
And you just might see -  
Yeah, you just might see -”

* * *

Castiel stands before the syrupy brown mottled-pattern wooden door of Oliver Pryce’s entryway. Little changed outside the home save an imperfect attempt at Enochian warding etched on the columns of the porch since he and Sam visited the hermetic psychic years ago in order to communicate with Bobby Singer in Heaven as they fought to free Dean from the Mark of Cain.

The angel plainly hears the scuff of slippers shuffling on the other side of the door and sees a shadow dim the dusky window pane as the old man beyond the barrier struggles to identify the interloper on his porch at this late hour without turning on the light to aid his failing cataract-obscured vision. Giving the man a generous minute more to respond based on a presumed feebleness given his advanced age, Cas jams his fists in his pockets and clenches his jaw as he turns around to survey the unclaimed newspapers scattered here and there on the overgrown front lawn. A minute, he determines, being plenty of time as Pryce really should have anticipated the angel’s arrival given his talents. Response not forthcoming, Cas knocks again, harder, this time grumbling in a foreboding gravel tone, “Oliver Pryce. I know you’re in there. Open up, or-”

The door swings inward to reveal the spectacled grey-bearded bushy-eyed one-time Men of Letters ally now-recluse famed child psychic looking none too pleased at having uninvited celestial company. Nudging thick glasses further up the ridge of his nose with a knobby finger, he narrows his gaze at the angel. “You. I told _you_ never to come back here.”

“You said no such thing,” Cas squints right back at him.

“Well, I thought it, and in my line of work it’s practically the same thing. Good riddance!” Pryce scoffs and tries to slam the door.

Cas extends a palm to forcibly brace the door open.

Pryce flinches and frowns as the door bounces back at him. “Can’t you see the warding?”

“I can,” Cas states with disinterest, “and as you can see by my continued presence, it’s poorly executed.”

Pryce adjusts his glasses again and squares up his rounded shoulders. “Yeah, well at least those useless symbols are enough to keep those meddling kids selling cookies off my doorstep. What are you selling?”

“I’m not selling anything.”

“You don’t say!” Pryce snorts and releases his grip on the door. Leaning across the threshold, he peers warily in either direction along the porch rails. There is no sound save the rubber-tread whoosh of a passing car and the squeaking chirrup of a cricket beneath the stair. Tightening the belt of his robe, he settles a suspicious glare on the impassive angel. “Where’s your hulk of a friend? Sam Winchester, wasn’t it? He hiding in the bushes waiting to bludgeon me with a club when I don’t cooperate with whatever nonsense you have in mind?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t already know I’m here alone.” Cas suppresses an impatient eye roll.

“No fooling an angel, eh?” Pryce peels the glasses from his face and plucks a hankie from his pocket to wipe them clean, as if this would somehow clear the cataract-haze from his vision and shed some additional light on the situation. “So what is it then, you here to tell me my time’s up? Collect my soul and ever-so-politely chauffer me to the pearly gates? That’s how this works, isn’t it?”

“I’d like to say _no_ ,” Cas lies, knowing there is no way for the man to read his intent and needing his cooperation, witting or no, to speak to you in a Heaven where he cannot tread, “but that all depends on whether you choose to help me or not, Mr. Pryce. So, will you help me?”

The old man eyes the angel speculatively as he speaks, “What happened to you anyway? You used to be all vibrant colors. Now there’s nothing. Just…muted greys. And…and-”

Cas’ patience wanes at the psychic’s probing remark. He stoops to his arthritic level and lowers his voice warningly. “You really should consider it a courtesy that I’m _asking_ for your help.”

“How magnanimous! When you put it that way, how can I refuse?” Pryce fumbles in the hot menace of angelic breath and nearly drops his glasses. Ramming them onto his face, he steps aside and bids the angel enter with a flap of his fingers. “I may not see much nowadays, but I see some things don’t change. Come in, not that you won’t anyway. What do you want this time?”

“There’s someone I need to speak to in Heaven.” Cas curtly acknowledges the coerced invite with a bob of his head and steps inside the stodgy over-furnished dwelling. Layers of collected dust blanketing the kitschy keepsakes sweep upward in a cloud in the billowed fabric wake of his trench coat.

“Of course there is.” The air in the room whooshes and pops as Pryce slams the door shut and fumbles with the array of dead bolts. “I used to be world famous, now I’m making collect calls to Heaven under duress,” he mutters under his breath. “Some retirement.”

Cas ignores the comment and continues walking, aiming for the dining room – the murky claustrophobic space where he and Sam spoke to Bobby; he supposes the setting will remain the same for the séance to contact you.

“Well, who is it this time?” Pryce stumbles after the sure-footed seraph.

“Does it matter?” Cas stops up short and the old man plows into him.

Pryce straightens his impact skewed specs and studies the strain shadowing the lines of the angel’s stoic features. “I suppose not. I’m curious though, what happened to her? This woman you love?”

“She-” Cas breaks off, heart leaping to throttle his throat, “how did you know? You can’t-”

Pryce waves a hand. “Don’t need to read a mind to recognize grief that deep when I see it. I’ll need something of hers, same as before.”

“Me,” the angel’s voice strains around the lump of grief threatening to suffocate him.

“What?”

“You have _me_. My heart, it’s hers-” Cas flattens a hand to his own chest.

Pryce gapes, tongue uselessly lolling around his ill-fitting dentures.

Cas’ fingers splay wide, gathering his shirt and tie in a balled fist, he growls, “Or would you prefer I rip the organ bloody and beating out of my vessel and place it there on the table for you to squint at, old man?”

Pryce blinks and slowly shakes his head. “Sheesh, you angels all so melodramatic? Go on, sit. And don’t touch anything. I’ll get my crap.”

Cas stiffly sinks into the nearest chair. When Pryce steps from the room and leaves him alone, the angel’s assertive posturing slackens. He exhales a relieved sigh, folds his hands in his lap, and lets his shoulders slump. His weary blues lower, ruminating upon the rut-worn oriental carpet covering the floor as he waits. 

* * *

_“Hey mister, are you lost?”_

_“No, I’m not lost. Why do you ask?” Cas’ gaze veers from the brightly colored spines of children’s books arrayed on the shelf before him to the bold boy, maybe 7 or 8 years old, standing beside him idly swinging his arms._

_Gawping, mouth stained cherry red from the lollipop currently clutched in his left hand, the boy ogles the angel. “You look lost,” he insists with a confidence only the purely innocent possess._

_“Do I?” Cas peers down at his trench-coated form. Finding no obvious outward signs of misdirection, his vision darts again to the myriad of books. You asked him to pick out a few volumes to fill the nursery shelf to balance the selection of Enochian lore while you use the bathroom of the bookstore. You let your angel wield his grace to do many things – magically mollifying your bladder not being one of them in spite of how many times the baby kick-boxing the organ sends you inconveniently scurrying. He’s been dallying here in the minutes since, deliberating on the various simple texts with dissertation level scrutiny._

_The boy bobs his head and sticks the spit-slick candy into his pant pocket. Wiping the sticky residue coating his fingers in a pink swirl across the front of his lime-hued dinosaur t-shirt, he mumbles, “Uh huh.”_

_Manners of hygiene wanting refinement aside, Cas appreciates no less the boy’s intuitive astuteness. “Well, I supposed I am a bit lost. I’m looking for a book. Perhaps-” He squats, squints, and gestures at the assortment of titles. “-perhaps you could recommend one or two?”_

_“Sure, what kind of stuff do you like?” Mirroring the angel’s staid squint, the boy embellishes a solemn demeanor with a contemplative placement of fingers thrumming his round chin._

_“It’s not for me. It’s for an infant. A girl. The woman I love, she’s…with child. I-I’m the father.” Cas peers around nervously mid-ramble, the thought suddenly occurring to him this may be an entirely inappropriate conversation to hold with this random child. “But perhaps I’m not supposed to reference reproduction when speaking with someone so young,” he lowers his tone and sheepishly straightens his crouched frame._

_“Oh, don’t worry about that mister, I know all about where babies come from. I have a little sister,” the boy pronounces matter-of-fact. “Santa delivered her last Christmas with my bicycle. It’s red and I don’t even need the training wheels no more.”_

_“Oh-” Cas arches an eyebrow. “I see.”_

_The boy’s desire to help is undeterred. “If she’s not delivered yet, and you don’t know what she likes, you should pick what you like, then you can share. My mommy says sharing is important.”_

_“Your mother sounds like a wise woman.” A soft smile shimmers on the seraph’s lips. He sinks once more to the boy’s short stature. “Almost as smart as you.”_

_The boy grins back, proudly proclaiming, “I like dinosaurs.”_

_Cas nods toward the boy’s soiled shirt. “That explains the tyrannosaurus rex. I like-” He pauses, pondering for a split second before offering an answer, “-bees.”_

_“The letter or the bug?”_

_Cas’ brow furrows. “Entomologically speaking, bees are classified as insects.”_

_Confusion clouds the boy’s expression. His ruddy mouth hangs agape. He knots the hem of his shirt between fidgeting fingers, deploying child logic, “But insects are bugs. So bees are bugs.”_

_“Actually, that’s a common misconception. Not all insects are bugs; however, all bugs are insects. Bees happen to be insects that aren’t bugs.”_

_“Is this man bugging you?” You sneak up in time to hear the last bit of the exchange between them and wink at the boy. Grin cushioned between the creases of your cheeks at the heartwarming sight of your seraph’s patient schooling, you dance your fingers dotingly across the glimpse of flesh visible above his coat collar. You can’t help but recall Sam’s sentiment that he’ll be a wonderful father._

_“I wasn’t-” The angel’s skin tints pink beneath your ticklish touch._

_The boy shrugs, smiles wider, and reaches sideways to pluck a book from the shelf.  “Nah. He’s funny. I was helping him find a good story.” He holds the square volume out to Cas. “Here, she’ll like this one. You too.”_

_Cas accepts the book and examines the cover. The title reads in bold block letters: THE BUSY BUMBLING BEE. He traces the calloused pad of his finger over the embossed black and yellow image of a soaring bee._

_“Hmm,” you muse over the angel’s shoulder, “I’d say he’s an expert helper, wouldn’t you agree Cas?”_

_Cas’ blues rise from the vibrant illustration to take in your playfully beaming aspect._

_Smile extending under his gentle regard, you glance from your angel’s eyes to the boy. Ruffling his hair, you ask in mock seriousness, “And how long have you worked here, young man?”_

_“I don’t work here,” the boy giggles and shrinks his neck shyly, tortoise-like, into the green shell of his shirt._

_“Well you could have fooled me!” you gush. Smiling eyes settling again on your angel. The maternal aura you exude is blindingly radiant to Cas’ angelic sight._

_Staring back at you, nodding coldly numb in the warm wash of light your soul emits, a solitary thought envelopes the angel’s mind in that moment – the absolute certainty he stole your chance to be the loving mother you were destined to be._

* * *

“Hello?”

“Hmm?” Cas flinches to alertness. Eyes flying open, disoriented in the abrupt disturbance of his drifting daze in memory, he grabs at the grooved wooden arms of the antique chair to ground himself.

Oliver Pryce’s scowling ashen aspect hovers mere inches from the angel’s astonished one. “I said, _hello_ ,” the man gripes. “You come banging on my door when I’m sound asleep and expect me to let you nap in peace while I do all the work?”

Cas collects his resolve with a crack of his jaw and tapering of his gaze. “Are you ready to begin?” he grits through clenched teeth and inclines intimidatingly toward the looming man.

Pryce backs off. “Two shakes. Help me move this table.”

Cas pushes to his feet and does as directed, sliding the table to the center of the room.

Pryce digs through a battered cardboard box on the sideboard, grumbling all the while under his breath, yanking out and unfolding a sigil-embroidered circular crimson cloth.

Cas watches as the old man’s once nimble hands shake and smooth the silken fabric over the table. In a few more minutes the angel will hear the familiar comfort of your voice. He’ll tell you how sorry he is about everything. How he wishes he could take your place. How lost he is without you. He’ll ask your forgiveness even though he believes he is unworthy of any absolution.

Pryce arranges the candles and strikes a match to light the wicks. A burst of sulphur scent flares as the flame flickers to life.

The angel’s attention averts to the outer realms of his regret. What if you inquire about the Winchesters? He remembers with a shiver the violent crack of Dean’s ribs shattering against the wall. It dawns on him that happened weeks ago. Weeks spent searching for Heaven’s gate only to be denied access. Weeks spent ignoring Sam and Dean’s calls. Anything could have happened in that time. Anything.

“You just gonna stand there like an idiot idol?” Pryce barks from where he is seated.

Cas staggers forward under the weight of his remorse. Supporting himself with a hand gripped to the chair, he slips heavily into the empty seat opposite the old man.

Pryce frowns and skims his wrinkled upturned palms across the table.

Inhalation harsh against the miasma of melancholy lodged in his lungs, Cas grabs Pryce’s proffered hands, unable to differentiate between the old man’s tremoring and his own uprising of nerves.

Eyelids falling shut, Pryce commences the Latinate incantation.

Observing the movement of the old man’s mouth, the dull dictation of syllables rolling from his tongue, a shocking realization strikes the angel, instilling him with dread – what if you ask about _her_?


	4. Act IV

Methodically consuming their wicks, the candle flames burn untiring. Diverting through the dining room, intermittent drafts wending richly oxygenated rivulets of invigorating freshness throughout the house cause the hair on the back of Castiel’s neck to prickle in a chill of anticipation. The anxiety-wrought contours of his face and the Pryce’s somber semblance are alit by the same shimmering glow of candlelight that extends beyond the table to breathe life into oversize shadow forms of the seated angel and psychic that play in pantomime upon the walls – a circle of ominous incorporeal company gathered round to observe the ceremony.

“Go on. Now or never,” Pryce urges.

Tear-pricked blues shut to shield from the hue of orange reflecting against his closed lids. Every muscle in the angel’s vessel coils and tenses to fend off the weight of grief still threatening, even here – at the brink of bridging the connection he feared he lost forever – to cave him inward, into the empty cavity of his heart. He inhales a measured breath and murmurs, “Y/N, it’s-it’s me.”

“Best be more specific,” Pryce mumbles, quick and hushed, out the corner of his creased mouth.

“It’s Castiel, your-” His rocky voice rumbles in an avalanche of nerves tumbling across creation to shatter upon the walls erected around the sheltered serenity of your everlasting rest. “It’s your…your angel.” The beat of his vessel’s heart racing rapt roars in his ears.

No response comes.

Eyes flickering open, his focus lifts upward. A rapid succession of blinks clears his bleared vision as though this might somehow enable him to see beyond the tin tile relief ceiling of the room and into your happily ever after to determine what delays you.

Not that Heaven is necessarily _up_ as human fancy of a _higher_ power through the centuries has delineated the domains to be as rendered through their creative bent in an endeavor to define and thereby understand a structure they cannot begin to fathom. Heaven simply _is_. _Up_ happens to be as convenient a place to look as any.

He tries again, willing you to hear him. “Y/N, my love. It’s Castiel.” _Your angel. The tattered remnants of your angel. Whatever remains of me, stricken, still yours._ He wonders if you know how far he has fallen this time – how great the extent of his failure. He wonders if, derailed by pain and incapacitated by an inability to move in any direction but that leading him further astray from grace, he has irrevocably hurt you and you’ve chosen to ignore him. And, if this is the case, he believes it’s deservedly so. “Y/N? I-” _Please._

Unsullied silence reigns.

Pryce’s fingers twitch in encouragement, or boredom; the psychic’s deeply creviced forehead reveals no outward clue specifically portending either emotion.

Cas sighs a long shaking breath. His wet-lashes lower to envision you before him on a luminous candlelit sight blank slate of shuttered skin to direct his effort to communicate. You coalesce there in his mind’s eye – a rendering through his woe, not the reality he seeks. Chin collapsed into the curvature of your collarbone, sorrowful disappointment palls your expression when you regard him. “Y/N, I need to talk, to tell you-,” he trails off, the shock of regret he conceives in your watery features compelling him to internalize the thought.

To tell you _what_? That he’s lost in grief. That he’s sorry. So _sorry_. Sorry for _what_? For loving you. The vow he couldn’t keep to protect you. Losing you. In your time together you gifted him all of yourself and demanded nothing of him in return save a single request – a simple promise entreated again and again in those final months. Everything else in his power he gave freely, but this solitary promise you prompted him to make you – to hold on to hope in a future without you – is the same promise he could not bear to swear knowing the heartbreaking sum of an angel’s love and the cost of his failure. How does such an unworthy creature, one whose devotion ultimately doomed his love – his salvation – to death, deserve any kind of hope? He can’t do this without you. Nothing before he met you seemed to matter in comparison to the redemptive joy of love cementing his heart to yours; and without you, no future is fathomable.

“I don’t know what to do anymore,” Cas implores. The wrecked plea plummets from his tongue. “I need you to tell me what to do. I need-” _Need you to tell me how to stop this hurt. How to do this alone. I need…you._

There is no sound save the shallow rattling respiration of the psychic and the odd creak of the home’s wooden joints settling into the foundation under a buffeting wind.

Attention centering on the old man, the black masses inhabiting the walls jolt, frenetic at the prompting of the angel’s impatient huff unnerving the candle flames.

Pryce’s frozen features capture a waxen replica of intent concentration. A sliver of glossy bloodshot globe peeps out above the bloated bags weighting his lower lids.

The knot of tension tightening in Cas’ chest snaps at perceiving the man’s composure. His contained anxious energy and self-loathing redirects in a surge of rage. His mouth quivers and curls; a flash of radiant blue grace illuminates his pupils. “Why isn’t it working?” he growls and constricts his grip on the man’s arthritic hands. Half of the wall shades sprout an unfurling span of black feathered wings.

Pryce pops open an eye. Unimpressed by the holy intimidation tactic, he spits in defensive annoyance, “You got me! I’m merely a hapless conduit a few seconds away from having a set of fractured mitts as thanks for trying. You mind?” His scruffy jowl jiggles toward Cas’ vice grip as he speaks. “They’re already pretty damned wonky what with the arthritis.”

Uprising of grace diminishing to gloom, Cas loosens his fists and let’s go. Looking away, he swallows thick in shame and draws the offending hands into his lap; he’s not so lost he doesn’t comprehend that harming the old man is wrong. “Perhaps the incantation was uttered incorrectly.” He directs his suggestion at a frayed fringe of the carpet.

“I’m geriatric, not dim-witted,” Pryce retorts – he may be out of practice, but he’s nonetheless prideful of his skill. Inclining forward, he blows out the candles with a spluttering of breath.

Smoke twists upward from the fizzling wicks dotting the softened beeswax. Evocative of flesh and bone smoldering to ash, disappointment and the charred scent accost the angel’s senses and freshen the rawness of his loss. His mind shifts to the night he stood by your funeral pyre – the guardian he failed to be while you yet lived – watching his heart go up in flame. Power sapped and useless from trying to resurrect you then, anesthetized from action unlike now, he feels his self-control slipping.

Pryce ignores the warning siren ringing in his intuition to back off and the spasmodic twitch seizing the angel’s slumped figure. He continues cogitating on the failure to contact you. “The spell isn’t the problem. Maybe there’s some kind of interference wherever she is preventing communication.” Settling back into the chair with a haggard groan, he shrugs and rubs at his aching knuckles.

The angel’s ire reignites at the insinuation you are not in Heaven. “What do you mean, _wherever she is_?” His mouth moves in a distant whisper of response compared to the overwhelming inner thrum of his grace reacting to the unthinkable possibility your soul is anywhere but within sanctity of Heaven.

Pryce holds up his throbbing crooked fingers in feeble renunciation of the statement. “Well don’t ask me, you’re the resident expert. I’m an atheist, _remember_?” He arches an overgrown white-bushed brow and against his better judgement chooses to tread a path of spiteful provocation – purposive payback for the thankless disruption of his evening. “So you tell me, Mr. Smarty-Pants. If not Heaven, where else do souls end up? Maybe you oughta check _there_ before breaking an old man’s knuckles, eh?”

It’s the breaking point for an already broken angel. The bodily vessel of Jimmy Novak barely withstands the blast of pressure placed upon its proverbial seams as the inconsolable anguish and divine wrath contained within uncontrollably swells and erupts in a light burst of celestial obliteration.

* * *

_You sweep your palm over the swell of your belly. Smiling fondly at the growing life within and everything good and hopeful she represents, you sniffle back the burn of tears brimming behind your eyes and pull the oversized corduroy jacket borrowed from Dean across your body to conceal the bump. She’s a bit over two and a half months along by your best estimate – halfway there by Nephilim standards. It’s been a month since you shared the news with your stunned angel. A month of him sinking further into despondency as you try to hang on to him – try to buoy him up with the great joy to come to keep him from drowning in woe._

_Castiel is trying, too. He tried to disguise his initial shock. He tries to hide his unrelenting distress by going through the motions and emulating your happiness. He tries, but you know every nuance of his handsome face and see his unabated agony despite your own tremendous gladness.  A gauzy veil of pain dulls the blue shine of his irises when he looks at you, as if every glance is accompanied by an unspoken apology. Even the tingling warmth of grace once leaping up from his skin at the stroke of your fingertips is now a cool pallor of flinching flesh beneath them. He treats you with an abundance of care – not in reverence for the miracle of your shared love as one would presume from an expectant father, but as one afraid to touch you for fear of doing more harm._

_You’re losing him, and no matter what you do he’s unable to see as you can how hope will endure when you’re gone. It’s why, unbeknownst to the boys and your angel who reluctantly left with them at your insistence for an overnight hunt, you’re standing here at a crossroad an hour’s drive from the bunker kicking dirt at the pretty yellow clusters of wild yarrow lining the roadside as you wait for the demon you summoned to deal for more time._

_You don’t want the standard ten years in exchange for your soul. Not even one year. Nor a month. Or a week. You’ll settle for one day more after she’s born. One hour if it comes down to it. You know when Cas sees her, once he holds her, he’ll understand the feeling you’ve been unable to convey in words. And you also know that you being there is the only way to guarantee that’s the way it happens. You’ll take one minute if that’s what the damned demon offers; after all, a whole lot of life changing can happen in sixty seconds. It took less time than that for Cas to fall in love with you and you with him – it only took a single look._

_“Aren’t you-?”_

_You spin in a whirl of dust, gravel crunching beneath your boots, to confront the bearer of the sensually-smooth feminine hum caught in the demon trap painted on the gravel in wetly gleaming red spray paint. “So what if I am?” you address the low-slung pin-stripe suit clad jaw-agape demon. She appears genuinely star struck by your presence. Or maybe it’s simply the fact she’s trapped and you’re a known associate of the Winchesters._

_“So what?” she snorts and smirks. Evidently having gathered her wits, she folds her arms over her bosom and spins sideways to mime disinterest despite her predicament. “It means no deal.”_

_Your lip snarls askance. You steal a step nearer without breaching the red line and lay a palm over the angel blade in your pocket. “You haven’t even heard-”_

_“No deal,” she repeats. “The boss says-”_

_“That will be enough, Candace.”_

_“Crowley.” You grit his name through your teeth, subduing a startled response. Sphincter squeezing against a sudden bladder spasm, you somehow succeed in avoiding pissing your pants over Crowley’s surprise appearance. He’d never let you or anyone you know live the embarrassing incident down. You squash your thighs together just to be safe._

_If he noticed, Crowley says nothing. “You did well,” he coos at his minion. With a swat of his hand, he cleaves the paint-coated gravel asunder to eradicate the ensnaring circle. Consideration diverting to you, he winks, offers an unapologetic half-grin, and compulsively checks the button of his black satin suit coat to ensure it hasn’t come undone in the inconvenient tribulation of his travel._

_“Thank you, your eminence,” the demon keens and bows, adding the correction, “And it’s Cameron, sir.”_

_“And you’re still here,” Crowley gripes. Raising snap poised fingers, his mouth morphs into an – It’s impossible to find good help these days! – frown._

_The demon poofs back into whatever hole she crawled out of for the occasion before he can incinerate her to punctuate his point by ending her pathetic existence._

_He lets out a sigh of lament._

_“Why wouldn’t your demon deal with me?” you ask, reflexively safeguarding the edges of your coat against his beady glare._

_“Y/N, it’s delightful to see you, too,” he muses, drinking in your blossoming figure up and down. “And might I add, you’re looking especially radiant this evening. You borrow Moose’s moisturizer? I hear coconut oil is all the rage these days.”_

_Ignoring his probing niceties, you narrow your inquiring gaze. “Why?”_

_“Oh-” He thoughtfully grasps at and rubs the fuzz of his beard. “They have strict orders not to deal with you, or the Winchesters, or any friends or associates of yours for that matter.”_

_“But-”_

_“Not interested.” Adjusting the knot of his tie, he spins on a heel and swaggers several steps up the road._

_“What’s that supposed to mean – not interested?” You stride after him and clutch at his elbow to prevent his leaving. You move to stand in front of him when he stops._

_Rolling his eyes, he jams his hands into his pockets and sets his jaw into an inflexible square over the bother presented by lingering long enough to give an explanation._

_You poke a demanding finger into his stocky chest, interposing every word with a sharp jab. “Since when is the king of Hell not interested in dealing for a human soul?”_

_He glowers at your finger until you remove the disrespectful digit. Raising his dark eyes to meet yours, he states, “Since a meddlesome member of the host of heaven I know and loathe happens to be quite abidingly attached to the soul in question.”_

_“What I want-”_

_“Doesn’t matter,” he cuts you off. “That halo-wearing heathen boyfriend of yours would tear down my kingdom – find a way to burn Hell itself – if he knew I was even talking to you. There’s some deals not worth the risk, no matter how gratifying the payoff. Bad for business, love.”_

_Crowley is your only chance. And even then, it’s only a chance. It’s not in any of the lore. The mother of a Nephilim dies upon the babe’s birth. Never has the death been averted, but maybe it can be delayed. You have to try, for your angel. You’d rather be ripped to shreds by Hellhounds knowing he’ll be okay – knowing that he has her, a renewed reason to go on. Hope. “It’s one minute I want,” you choke, cursing your hormones for crumbling your fortitude. Voice dense with a tangle of tears, you reiterate, “It’s just one minute. It’s for Cas. He needs-”_

_“I don’t care! And do you think he’s likely to care when he finds out why?” Avoiding witnessing the undignified discharge of tears dampening your cheeks, his gaze veers upward to the expansive cloudless star-dappled darkness overhead. He procures a four-square folded embroidered handkerchief from his pocket and offers it to you without looking._

_Sniffling, you accept the chivalrous silken courtesy and wipe your nose._

_“Y/N, I-” Vacillating, lower lip undulating with a tremor, he almost appears sympathetic to your plight – almost seems on the verge of giving in to your desperate display of emotion to at least listen. Obstinate sense of self-preservation persevering over pet interests, he bites the compassionately mutinying lip and shakes his head. “He’d destroy me. You heard my demon. No deal.”_

_“Crowley, please. I’m begging you!” You reach out to him. Your fingers contract around empty air. “Coward!” you holler, your cry – a cloud of white breath dissipating into the crisp night – unheard except by the darkness._

* * *

“Damnit, Dean!” Sam swipes his hand across the map table and propels a pile of papers skittering sideways, noisily flitting and flapping to litter the floor. Pacing the length of room in leggy panic, he pauses to look down at the computer screen to skim the police report he knows backward and forward by now, having read it over and over and coming to the same grim conclusion each time.

It details the graphic demise of one Oliver Pryce, sometime child psychic, retired hermit, neighborhood curmudgeon. Body burnt to a crust, home gutted, a freak explosion of natural gas is strongly suspected. The officer on call had the audacity to muse, off-handedly in the initial written assessment of the scene, as to whether the gentleman predicted his own death and whether, in choosing to remain in repose at his dining room table, his untimely departure from this world implies suicide. In so far as Sam is concerned, the officer is no more than a functional idiot.

Sam smashes the tab button on the keyboard, switching to the coroner’s report and the photo of the decedent’s corpse. Although badly deteriorated, he discerns the distinctive scorch of sunken flesh around the eye sockets of the old man’s skull – the signature mark indicative of an angel kill; and Sam knows of only one angel with knowledge of and a reason to seek out the psychic. Sam also knows what Castiel did to Dean when he left, the uninhibited outburst of anger; and if their friend has gone this far off the deep end mourning you, if he’s killing innocents, it’s a code red and Dean isn’t answering his goddamned phone.

The console in the corner containing random outmoded Men of Letters tech – and which the Winchesters use for the same storage purposes – begins to ring. Sam locates the box of extra burner phones they have tossed aside there and, rifling through, uncovers the one making the racket.

He picks up the call on speaker option. “Hello?”

“Hey Sam!” Jody’s cheerful raspy greeting blasts through the speaker.

“Jody, hey,” Sam pants.                  

“This a bad time? You sound out of breath.” All the cheer drains from her tone. “I knew something was up, your other number kept going straight to voicemail.”

“No, I was just, uh, looking for something.” It’s not a lie. Technically he’s looking for his brother. Sam concentrates on and calms his breathing. “It’s…everything’s good. Great. Really.” He leans against the console and pinches the bridge of his nose, nasally when he asks, “What’s up?”

“You see that police report I sent?”

He jams a knuckle into the rippling groove of skin mid-forehead, endeavoring to keep his reaction neutral. “Yeah. Like you said, looks like an angel kill.”

“If you boys are too busy, Donna and I can check it out, see what we can dig up. Call you in if there’s trouble.”

Sam’s hand flops limp to swing at his side. Dean is supposed to be with Donna, chasing ghouls two states over. “Donna’s there? Right now? With you?” he blurts out in bewilderment.

“Heya Sam!” Donna’s quirky accent trills distant but distinct over the open line.

Jody doesn’t miss a beat in her laughing response. “Yeah, really got the estrogen cranked to the max around here these days. Girl power, ya know. Thought she told you she moved in?” Her voice muffles along with the rustling sound of a hand cupping close to the phone. “You know, after what happened with Doug and all.”

“Yeah, right, must’ve slipped my mind.” Suppressing his irritation over Dean having lied about his whereabouts, Sam angles to end the conversation. “So, uh, Dean and I, we’ll check out the Pryce thing, okay?”

“You sure?”

“We’re on it!” Sam simulates enthusiasm.

Sheriff’s suspicion rears in Jody’s parting query. “You need any help in the meantime finding that something you said you’re looking for?”

Sam stiffens at the question, carefully wording his answer. “No, no, that’s okay. I’m sure it’ll turn up here in the bunker in a couple days.”

Acceptance in the form of a stern warning follows a skeptical silence. “I don’t hear from you to check in in two days, I’m putting out an APB on both of your asses. You got it?”

“Thanks Jody.” Sam grabs his jacket off the back of the chair and sets off toward the garage. He’s counting on Dean having told him at least half the truth, that the location he said he was headed to, at least, is real. Partway on his journey through the hall, his urgent footsteps echoing on the tile, he stops in his tracks and remembers your sleeping daughter.

* * *

The early evening sky streaks with the receding golds of day as Dean wheels into the parking lot of the playground and pulls up alongside a rickety post and rail fence at the far end. A cloud of dust explodes in his wake. He squints through the haze at the world reflected behind him in the rearview mirror. It’s a mostly deserted area save for a girl on a swing and a young couple with a stroller meandering down a footpath toward the exit. Leaving the Impala idling, he swings open the door and steps outside. Still squinting, he consults the phone in his palm. According to the tracking program they installed as a precaution on Cas’ phone and a blinking red triangle, Dean should be standing right on top of the missing seraph.

The girl in the flowered sun dress pumping her legs on the swing drags her heels to a halt and gawks at the hunter suspiciously.

Dean elevates his attention from the screen at the abrupt absence of the rhythmic metallic squeaking of the swing’s chains. The wind gusts, whipping through his hair, coolness penetrating the light jacket and layers of flannel to stipple his skin with goosebumps. Given the dipping temperature, it occurs to him that the girl’s garb is decidedly inadequate given the season. He pockets the unhelpful cell. Glancing around to ensure he and the peculiarly weather-resistant child are alone, he trudges across the gap separating them. At a cushioning distance of several meters, he clears his throat and shouts, “You an angel?”

A smirk upturns her mouth as if to say _don’t ask stupid questions_. “Are you a Winchester?” she sneers.

“I’m looking for Castiel. I know he was here.”

“He was _there_ ,” she sighs in apparent boredom over her assigned watch and indicates a trampled area of grass between a wooded copse and the sandbox, “now he is _no longer_.”

At her choice of words, worry sinks Dean’s stomach. Pitching forward to the spot, his greens search the ground for a seared imprint of wings. Finding nothing, he gulps, “He’s not-?”

“Dead? No,” she states, tone a tad too regretful for Dean’s preference, “but he’d be better off.” She fishes her fingers into the pocket of her dress.

Dean’s hand delves into his jacket, hovering over the blade tucked therein.

“Relax, Dean. I have no grievance with you.” She produces Castiel’s discarded phone and tosses it at the hunter’s feet. “It seems like you’re looking for this. It would appear your friend doesn’t want to be found. Best leave him be. He’s so broken there’s no telling what he’ll do next.”

“What happened here?” Dean bends to pick-up the phone, taking advantage of the unusually forthcoming sentry.

“Castiel surrendered to the will of Heaven. Begged on his knees to be punished for his sins in exchange for speaking one last time to the soul he professes to love. Imagine _that_ , an angel loving a human.” The tale told not stirring any empathy within her, the girl toes the rut of dirt worn out beneath the swing with utter indifference.

“And?” Dean prods for the story’s end.

“ _And_ , we denied him. Debauched angel that he is, he’s your problem now, not ours. Besides, this departed soul he seeks, she’s not even in the halls of Heaven.”

“Not in Heaven?” Dean gawps at the girl. A convulsion of fury heaves in his body at the thought you are not at peace. Producing the angel blade, he pounces at the girl before she can react. Flipping her backward off the swing, he pins her flailing to ground. Palm smashed to her mouth to stifle her screams for help, he lodges the tip of the blade beneath her round jaw. “If Y/N’s not in Heaven, _where is she_? What did you do with her?”

She ceases struggling and mumbles something against his palm.

Glowering warningly, he elevates his hand slightly so she can speak.

“I did nothing!” she hisses. “We did _nothing_!”

Unconvinced this is the extent of her knowledge, Dean pricks the blade deeper into her skin.

She whines, “All I know is what I’ve heard – Castiel turned up here seeking entry into Heaven to talk to her. As I’ve already said, he was turned away. They say her soul was marked for Heaven, but it never arrived at the gates. That’s it! Now I suggest you let me go before my brothers and sisters arrive and give _your soul_ the opportunity to see for yourself that she is not there.”

Stunned by the revelation of your uncertain fate, Dean rocks back onto his heels.

The angel scrambles to her feet, brushes the dirt and grass clippings from her frock, and bolts for the tree line before he can recover his wits.

* * *

Castiel regains consciousness on the floor with his back wedged against a door. His eyes follow the arc of high beams from a passing car as they shine through thin curtains covering the window beside him to bounce across the dingy walls. He surmises from the ill-kempt commercial décor and the musty odor filling his nostrils that he’s in a cheap motel room. His focus drops to the room key and receipt on the floor between his folded knees. According to the date printed on the slip of paper and his internal celestial clock of reckoning adjusted for the Gregorian calendar, he checked in nearly a full day ago. Dazed by the act of wakening from a blackout, it’s not immediately apparent to him _why_ he’s here.

He sits unmoving in a state of mindless acceptance of the strange situation until his stare wanders to the blackened hands upturned in his lap. Studying the calloused soot-glazed whorls of the singed digits, he precipitously remembers the missing _why_ of his collapse _._ Roused, but not recovered, horror flows from the hollow of his heart in a whimpering groan as every single terrible _why_ that led him here – starting with a neglected promise to his vessel’s original owner and culminating with the vestiges of life light fading from your aspect – surface all at once to spill from the corners of his eyes. These same hands once tenderly touched you; loved you, but could not save you – could not protect the most cherished thing to him in all of creation. These hands, he thinks, deal in nothing but destruction.

He didn’t mean to kill Pryce. It was an accident – a devastating loss of control at the implication your soul resides in Hell. Your beautiful soul – kind, patient, and so full of love – tarnished and tortured because he loved you. Loves you still. Streaking tendrils of tears trace ashen trajectories down his cheeks. Smoke and soot cling to his trench coat from the fiery explosion of his grace; the scorching stink of death seeps into his skin, circulates in his blood, and taints what persists of his depleted divine gift. When he exhales, the unfiltered shuddering sob serves only to renew the desolation haunting him and the pressing need to fix this wrong to you at any cost.

Closing his grimy fists, he clenches the fingers until the nails puncture skin and blood streams from the wounds. Rolling to one side, groaning with the effort, he rocks to his knees and crawls to the center of the room. Moving with rigid mechanical precision, he fashions a demon trap with the only tool available to him – smears of his own trickling blood. Completing the circle, clambering to his feet using a wobbly dresser for support, he shuts his swollen red-rimmed eyes and speaks the Enochian spell to compel Crowley to the spot.

“Castiel, to what do I owe-” Crowley manifests facing the peeling fleur de Lis print wallpaper sticking to the wall over a sagging mattress. “-oh.” Eyes darting to the blood sigil entrapping him, he smooths his coat lapels nonchalantly and turns with a flourish. The demon prepared for any contingency finds himself wretchedly _under_ prepared for this one. “Mate, you look terrible. Rough day?” he deadpans a cockney accent to cover his concern; cause his concern, it _concerns_ him, too, which is, to put it bluntly, rather concerning for a being whose business is not being concerned about anything that doesn’t directly concern him. He arches a brow.

“Where. Is. She?” Propelling off the dresser, Cas hurtles to the edge of sigil with unsteady momentum. Angel blade clutched in one bloodied hand, his other extends menacingly. “You have her, don’t you? Defiling her even now as you stand there leering at me and feigning ignorance.”

Crowley casually spies the drips of crimson gathering from the angel’s pointed hand congealing in a puddle to blemish the sigil. Second brow joining the first in its ascension up his forehead, he cocks his chin to peer into the angel’s lightless blues. He’s never seen Cas this vulnerable. Not even when he was subsisting on borrowed grace and dying. Not feeling particularly threatened by obvious angelic impotence, biding his time until the sigil is defaced by its maker, the demon shrugs. “I thought we’d moved beyond the whole _will they won’t they_ angels versus demons versus mankind love triangle into a comfortable copacetic grey area.”

“Where is-” Still debilitated from the nuclear explosion of grace that killed Pryce, Cas coughs and buckles to one knee, sputtering, “-she?” The blade slips from his grip and hits the carpet with a dull thud. Lurching forward, he snags Crowley by the coat, besmirching the demon’s debonair airs as he struggles to upright himself.

Crowley clasps the angel by the wrist and rotates it viciously outward, half to aid him in standing, half to fling off his grubby grip. He can only assume the angel found out about his conversation with you a few months ago and this meeting is somehow the result of whatever _that_ was – it’s a concerning development for the demon. He yanks Cas up by the collar, breath blistering in the beleaguered angel’s face. “What kind of a nincompoop do you take me for? As a rule, you don’t rise from the rank of crossroads demon to manage all of Hell by making a regular habit of buggering your best feathered frenemy’s girl.”

“You lie!” Cas wheezes.

“Okay, so I admit to making the rule up just now – selflessly and entirely for your benefit, I might add – but when she begged, _begged_ me to ink a deal, I politely declined. Not my soul to barter. Wherever she is, I don’t have her.” Crowley casts the angel aside with a shove.

“Another lie.” Cas sways and sinks to the floor, clawing at Crowley’s legs all the way down. From the exertion, his vision tunnels, going dim at the edges. He fights to hold on to awareness. “She’s not…not in Heaven. So you’re a…a liar. You have her…her soul.”

Something resembling pity softens the demon’s expression. “She’s dead then.” It’s both a statement and question.

“Take _me_.” Cas grovels at the demon’s polished shoes, his vessel wracked by a series of gasping sobs. “Free her soul and take _me_.”

“It’s a tempting offer,” Crowley murmurs as if he couldn’t easily end the currently defenseless and senseless seraph once and for all, deal or no, “but like I said before, I haven’t got her soul in my possession to trade.”

A melancholic moan of relief quakes through the angel’s withered form. For all his insistence of Crowley being a liar, he construes no actual benefit for the demon to lie about having you and thus accepts the rebuff as truth.

Crowley crouches to rest a hand on the Cas’ shoulder. He simultaneously notices the sigil is ruined; and has likely been for many minutes now. He sighs, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for your loss.” Perhaps a piece of him is sorry, but never one to miss an opportunity to take an exit, he vanishes.

The condolence is worth very little to the shell of a seraph left curled up on the floor.


	5. Act V

The cold cast indigo hue of nocturnal sky thaws dusky gold on the horizon. Sun rising to outshine the canvas of stars with her gleaming splendor, distant crystalline dots blot out one by one as gently glimmering wisps of morn caress the dewy damp of outspread earth. The ascending light, like that defining each day before and those yet to come, illuminates an everlasting promise in its unfolding; a dawn declaration of endless rekindled potential for new beginnings no matter how dark or pervasive the clasp of night.

An indiscriminate smiling beam slithers through the budding leaves of a lanky old oak tree and bounces, refracting in brilliance off the roof of a rusted brown and beige truck to touch upon the paint-peeled pane of the window fronting the corner room of a rundown motel. In the span of a minute, it grows wider to lay a ribbon of sunny yellow across the grey opacity of glass, infiltrating a gap between the murk and blinds within to rest in rejuvenating warmth across the grief-stricken countenance of the cataleptic celestial being coiled on the floor.

Blinking his salt-crusted lashes dryly, Castiel pivots his head to avoid the shine shifting to sting his vision. 

The renewing ray, insistent on delivering its optimistic message, increases with heated intensity over the vulnerable lobe of his ear. Kissing the sensitive skin thereon, the streak of sun whispers a warm reminder of the soothing words you spoke to the angel on the rooftop dawn of your last day together. _“You ever wonder what a sunrise is, angel? I think it’s a promise fulfilled. A beginning born from darkness. The light is hope.”_

He closes puffy tear-swollen blues; neck lolling, he submits to the velvet reminiscence of your voice hotly ghosting his vessel’s flesh and, in doing so, to the persevering brightness blanketing its blaze across his shuttered lashes. Exhaling a strident sigh, exhausted and out of energy to continue to fight, he acquiesces acceptance to the balmy hope softening the lines of lament etching his stoic façade. Haze of struggle evaporating, the dense mist guarding his heart from feeling all else in the denial of your death dissipates in concession. He understands in the lucidity of lightening day and unclouded love what you meant about the sunrise; and not merely what you _said_ , but what you were asking of him – what he could not comprehend until he could fall no farther.

_“No matter what happens, the sun always rises. Promise me you’ll remember that, angel.”_

He realizes you were asking him all along to reassure _you_ , to promise that the hope you carried, the hope you wanted him to share in, was enough for _him_ ; you were scared, and through his own blind terror of losing you he could not give you the comfort you needed most of all. You were asking him not to hold on to hope for himself, a sentiment exiled by inner reproach when he learned of the pregnancy and dubbed himself your executioner, but to nurture yours on in your stead as a torch to navigate the gloomy days ahead; you knew, tried desperately to tell him, that hope has ways of mending broken hearts.

Lying there, lashes lifting, Cas accepts you are gone, truly _gone_ ; although, not as completely as his despondent search led him to believe. Traces of you live on in his enduring love, in the memories of those you loved, and in the life you and he created – the daughter he, drowning in inky salt seas of sorrow over your death, selfish in suffering anguish, did not so much as acknowledge when she, too, mewled for you in mourning and cried out for a father’s succor – that piece of himself he could not freely give until he stumbled upon, in the darkest recesses of despair, the fragment of light leading to self-forgiveness.

In the brightness of full daybreak saturating the rundown room, basking the seraph’s fallen form in a glorious glow, facets of sapphire refract the hopefulness awakening in his eyes. He licks the cracked outline of his lips to wet them, encouraging pink to pervade the blanched petals; sliding an elbow beneath his torso, smearing the blood-flaked remnants of the demon trap on the floor, he pushes himself upright to slump against the creaky bedframe. “I remember,” he murmurs to the radiance-filled room, to you, and to the gift you gave him, the girl he’s ready now to embrace, “and I promise.” Staggering to unsteady feet, fingers outstretching toward the doorknob, he prays it’s not too late.

“Well?” Sam pushes a hand through his hair where he stands in the threshold, glancing expectantly between a bewildered Jack and your tot-statured daughter.

The girl presently sprawls on a blanket playing quietly with a stuffed bear and various other colorful baubles collected in her exploration of the library’s low-lying shelves. In three day’s absence Dean managed to miss her transition from crawling to toddling and the resultant rapid-fire scramble to baby-proof – Nephilim-style replete with Enochian warding _and_ cabinet locks – a bunker drama _that_ developmental milestone entailed. Sam’s convinced he missed something in his haste, so he can’t just leave her with anyone while he goes hunting for his brother.

Jack’s squint narrows further, having the effect of unifying his brow and forehead into a tense trough of pale complexion. “You want me to … babysit?” he asks, intonation a rising squeak of incredulity at the end.

“Yeah,” Sam’s answer exits as an airy burst of breath, “I need you to keep her safe. She’s … _special_.”

The clarification, as well as an intrinsic curiosity, alleviates some of the boy’s trepidation. “She-she’s like me.”

“Yes, and Castiel is her father.” Sam affirms, a small smile skirting his mouth at Jack’s no longer being alone in this world in terms of his _being_. Seeking belonging, the teenage experience, the boy enrolled at a boarding school months back to try out the stereotypical trappings of youth in lieu of the supernatural for a while. It was Castiel who barred the brothers from telling Jack about your pregnancy so as not to have him around as a constant reminder of Kelly’s fate.

Jack’s gaze blows wide in a jolt of realization. His train of thought derails aloud. “If Castiel is her father, that means Y/N, she-”

“She’s gone.” Sam sets a palm to the boy’s shoulder and gives it a squeeze.

“Like my mother,” Jack mumbles the reflection through a frown. Although he wasn’t especially close to you, he empathizes for your daughter losing her mother, and for Castiel losing the woman he loves. The past few weeks of the angels unanswered calls suddenly begin to deeply worry the boy. He chews the inside of his cheek.

Sam mirrors the frown, his weighted down more so with remorse. “Cas didn’t-,” he pauses to correct, firm, “ _we_ didn’t want to worry you while you were at school.”

Jack swallows hard, frets his mouth into a colorless mass and looks at the floor. “It’s okay,” he concedes, a blonde shock of hair hanging across his dampened aspect, “I understand.”

Sam loosens a sigh of relief. For being Lucifer’s issue, the boy inherited none of the archangel’s cold-heartedness and proclivity toward grudges.

Concern for Castiel rearing, Jack’s regard rises to peer around the map room and library niches visible from where they stand. “What I don’t understand is, where is Castiel?”

It’s too much to encumber the boy with, the angel’s desertion, Dean’s deceit-veiled disappearance most likely to track down the seraph and do God knows what to him with the rage that’s been boiling his blood for weeks, Sam nonetheless deems honesty appropriate given the circumstances. “He’s gone too.”

Jack’s eyes startle.

“Not _gone_ gone,” Sam swiftly reassures. “He took off after Y/N died.”

“Castiel … _left_? Left his daughter alone? But she needs him.” Confusion again crevices the boy’s brow. “I don’t understand.”

“Join the club,” Sam huffs.

“There’s a club?”

“No, there’s not a club.” Sam subdues an incongruous in affront to sharing this awful news smirk of amusement; Jack’s seriousness of interpretation reminds him greatly of Cas when they first encountered the angel. “It’s, uh, a figure of speech.”

“Oh.”

“Something inside Cas broke when we lost Y/N. He went off the reservation.” Sam amends the non sequitur of using another metaphor. “Er, I mean he left the bunker.”

“And why did Dean leave? Did something inside him break too?”

“Yeah. Yeah, Jack.” Sam jostles the boy’s shoulder roughly, his rasping voice broaching on a whisper. “I guess you could say that Dean’s heart broke for that little girl. He knows how much she needs her father.”

A clatter behind the door at the top of the staircase diverts both their attentions. Dean’s jut-jawed dark-blonde freckled face emerges a few millimeters ahead of his taut flannelled frame.

“Dean!” Legging it in three steps to the base of the stairs to meet him, Sam throws his hands in the air demanding an explanation. “Where the hell have you been?”

“We have a problem,” Dean grunts, blustering past him to hurtle his duffle haphazardly at the map table and sink into the nearest chair. “Hey, Jack, how’s school?” Noticing the boy dawdling on the opposite end of the table, he flicks him a greeted salute and, rocking his neck to settle a stern look upon Sam, gestures a thumb back at him as if to say, _‘Really, you freaked out and got the kid involved?’_

Jack may be oblivious at times, but he can tell Dean’s not interested in an answer.

Snorting, Sam is having none of Dean’s evasive nonsense. “A problem? No kidding! I’ve been calling you for two days. What if something happened?”

Dean got the messages, none of which expressed anything negative having happened aside from Sammy finding out he wasn’t actually with Donna on a hunt; not wanting to argue about where he was and why, he ignored them. Crossing his arms over his chest, casting a cool green gaze at his brother, he states in deflection, “Y/N’s soul isn’t in Heaven.”

“Wh-what?” Sam, dizzied by disbelief, drops jelly-kneed into an adjacent seat.

“Where is she?” Jack asks, peering between the brothers.

“She couldn’t be in-?” Sam hesitates to suggest Hell.

Dean knows exactly what Sam is thinking, he had the same thought, however heart wrenching the very notion. He shrugs, “Gave Crowley a call. No answer. _Yet_. Seem suspicious to you?” He quirks a brow for emphasis.

Sam’s chin wags in agreement as to the suspect nature of the demon’s avoidance. “And Cas? You get Jody’s e-mail about Oliver Pryce?”

Dean sighs, prods a thumb at his temple in frustration, then jabs the digit into his eye and rubs until the socket is furious red. “Yeah, trail went cold. No new leads, it’s like Cas went poof after the explosion.”

Jack’s anxiety palpably electrifies the room. “You think Castiel is-?”

“No … _no_.” Dean quickly dismisses the possibility of Castiel’s fatal angelic retirement. He still owes the damned fool a bruising wallop, and as far as his friend is concerned, there’s no chance the angel gets to die without Dean first getting a crack at him. “I checked, no wing prints anywhere.”

Jack melts into the nearest chair in a puddle of relief.

“You could’ve called,” Sam mutters again in the strain of silence.

Dean knows. He still doesn’t want to argue about it. Not with your little girl so close. “How is she?”

Sam can’t help but smile knowing how happy she’ll be that Dean is home. She’s not tactful about hiding the fact uncle Dean’s clownishness makes him a clear favorite, not that she isn’t always up for Sammy snuggles. “She’s good – great actually. Been rearranging artifacts on the library shelves with Bear-Bear all morning and saying she’s helping ‘we-search.’”

Clear blue eyes dart now and then toward the conversation of her caretakers and the newcomer, a being exuding pure curiosity whose soul and power resonate at so similar a frequency to hers as to be instantly familiar – _family_. Long lashes blink, shadowing a rosy-mantled cheek shyly buried in the brown faux fur of a teddy clutched in plump arms – a stuffed buffer to the bunker’s underground bleakness. She doesn’t understand all the words touching her tender ears. Sensitive to emotion though, she reads their feelings in the same manner a person might scan the bolded headlines of a newspaper.

She senses Sam’s anxiety abated with the return of his brother and the surge of urgent concern for Castiel’s whereabouts shifting into its stead. She feels the fevered frustration of Dean over his failure in finding her father, the simmering anger directed at the angel bubbling to the surface, and also the conflicting affection for him. They talk and talk, suppressing true sentiment for her sake, thinking it’s the right thing to do, thinking it cushions her from the calamity of heartbreak she was birthed into, and yet she comprehends the truth through everything they feel.

Born into a world shrouded in darkness, a child of death and doubt and anguish, she should be sad. The sleepy smile toying around her innocently plush mouth suggests she is not. Gold glints of a sun she hasn’t seen yet but knows exists, an inner glow growing stronger each day, ring her blue irises. _Hope_ , burning bright like the sun, arises from the deepest dark.

A strange impression accosts her from the far corner of the library, flaring pinpricks of reactive fire in her gaze. Threads of avarice and a sinister inquisitiveness weave into the tailored Italian silk-suited figure of a man with an appearance alternately perverted by grotesqueness then simpering with a close-cropped salt and pepper shave. She hugs Bear-Bear tighter, tiny fingers digging into the plush pelt as the demon warily eyes the book-lined walls and, satisfied he’s out of sight line, swaggers confidently in approach.

Crouching before her, extricating his palms from his pockets, a disingenuous smirk centers above his bearded chin. This, this _treasure_ , must surely be the source of the seraph’s sorrow and the living embodiment of your demise. He sees the halo of power pulsing from her – a Nephilim, and Castiel’s own judging by the curious blue depths of her contemplation. Crowley didn’t think the fallen angel had it in him to sire a child, especially knowing the cost for you to bear her to birth – your pleading to deal, the angel’s anguished demands of the demon at that God-forsaken motel, it makes such perfect sense he can’t believe he didn’t surmise the details of the situation before now in order to better bend them to his, and Hell’s, advantage.

Beady black eyes dash beyond the girl, gauging whether the Winchesters in the adjacent room will hear his whispered words. Deciding not, cocking his head in wonderment, he mutters under his breath, “My my, what sort of shiny trinket do we have hiding in here?”

Fear a foreign concept, she does not flinch from his reaching fingers, the flames of self-serving intent lapping her skin from their tips, nor does she duck from the thoughts of how he could bend the budding power of a Nephilim to his will. Instead, she feels emanating from the black-cordoned shriveled heart barely beating in his chest, the conflicted sentiments of a man lacking a mother’s love who spends eternity endeavoring to fill that empty space inside with concrete connection. Pitying his plight, she offers him Bear-Bear to hug.

Focus flicking to the still empty threshold, unable to see in himself as she does the stricken source driving his every action, he grins at the perceived pureness of her naivety. “I’m Crowley. Can you say, Crow-ley?” he enunciates slowly.

“Cwo-ley,” she tries in a bashful murmur.

His smile stretches. “And what’s your name, poppet?” It would be easy to snatch her away, make an escape with this unguarded prize, play out her potential – some unacknowledged sentiment stays his hand a moment too long.

“Get away from her!” A hurricane of red flannel, Dean swoops in to scoop up the girl. “You okay, sweetheart? Did the bad man hurt you?” Dropping Bear-Bear in the tumult, she loops her arms loosely around his neck and buries her flushed face into his shirt. Tears prick her eyes in sensing the alarm of emotion discharging from Dean as he does a cursory visual exam to determine if she’s been hurt.

Crowley has the unholy audacity to appear wounded at the insinuation he would mistreat the child.

“How the hell did you get in here?” Sam positions himself as a human buffer between Dean clutching your daughter and the demon.

“How the Hell, indeed,” Crowley scoffs, straightening himself, his injured pride, and his creased suit. “Considering it was you who rang me, I mightn’t have bothered carving time out of my busy day, well” –his forehead arcs upward in reflection, a smirk affecting his mouth– “carving up souls, if I’d known to expect an unfriendly reception. Not that I expect _much_ from you lot.”

Jack, straighter to the point even than Castiel, intuiting from the conversation this is the Crowley Sam and Dean suspect knows something of the location of your soul, steps forward to sternly ask, “Do you have Y/N’s soul?”

“That, it seems, is the question of the hour.” Crowley scrutinizes the boy up and down, curling a lip in approval. “And who is this youthful Adonis?”

“Screw the games you limey little bastard! Answer him,” Dean growls, satisfied your daughter is unharmed save for being upset. “Do you have her, or not?”

The demon’s lids narrow. “Tit for tat.”

“My name is Jack,” the boy’s tongue cuts in sharp-edged reply, curtly complying with the stated terms.

“Well, _Jack_.” Crowley thrusts two fingers into his inside breast pocket causing both Winchesters to reactively flinch in anticipation of danger. He whips out a perfectly non-lethal silver-embellished matte black business card. He proffers the rectangular trifle to Jack. “You ever get bored mingling with the local wildlife, _do_ get in touch.”

“Or don’t.” Twisting his torso to protect your daughter, Dean intercepts the hand off. Squinting to read the snatched card, his greens flare in exasperation. “Twitter? Really?”

Suaveness sustained in affront to Dean’s cynicism, Crowley shrugs. “It’s the digital age of deals. You think the Donald got elected to the highest office in the nation because he promised to make America great again?”

“You didn’t answer me,” Jack interrupts, unwilling to be sidetracked by the swindling demon.

Crowley summarily avoids answering. “Are you boys running a Nephilim orphanage now?” Countered by Sam’s knot-browed tight-lipped scowl, he diverts his thwarted attention again to Jack. “Are you one of Castiel’s spawn, too? The resemblance _is_ uncanny.” Judging by Dean’s cringe, he infers he’s hit the nail on the proverbial head at least as to the girl’s parentage. A self-congratulatory smirk crinkles his eyes.

Uncertain, Jack looks to Sam, seeking his opinion on expounding upon his origins to the interloper.

Conscious of the effect the devilish origin of the information will have on Crowley’s composure given their sordid history, Sam nods.

“Actually-” A compact smirk sets up in the crook of Jack’s mouth, dimpling his cheek as he speaks. “Lucifer is my father.”

“Lucifer?” Crowley gulps, swallowing down the name hard against the too tight tie encircling his throat.

“Yeah, _Lucifer_.” Jack echoes.

The demon adjusts the knot of his tie to accommodate a thickening gorge. The smirk donning his mien fades to a forced feint of a smile.

“You really should answer him,” Sam menaces, peril plummeting his tone.

Rethinking the circumstances in light not of what he can gain, but rather of all he has to lose, namely his kingly title to a princely heir of Lucifer himself, not to mention his life, Crowley determines cooperation to be the shrewdest course. Coolly containing his terror with perfunctory poise, cocky glance flitting between the brothers, the unassuming teenage son of Satan, the sniffling heavenly abomination half-hidden in the folds of Dean’s shirt, and sliding beyond to where Castiel dallies in the oversized doorway to the map room – the seraph having entered into the confrontational equation through the front door only a minute ago, entrance unheard on account of demonic distraction.

Crowley trades gazes with the angel and shoots him a sympathetic frown, stunning even himself with the genuineness of the gesture. “As I already told Castiel when he summoned me, I do _not_ have Y/N’s soul.” The King of Hell lingers several sadistically satisfying seconds to appreciate the shock value of the revelation as the individual focus of those gathered instinctively follows his to land on the wayward angel returned home.


	6. Epilogue

Glass-glazed expression a blue swirled amalgam of apprehension and apology, Castiel freezes a dozen or so feet from the brothers, Jack and _her_ – your daughter, _his_ daughter, tucked safely in Dean’s shielding clutch. In the strangled silence the small distance between them might well be an endless stretch of desert miles; the girl, his _family_ , a watery mirage of relief hovering just beyond the reach of woefully wearied legs. It’s been a few weeks; compounded with the magnitude of losing you, confronted with the physical manifestation in toddler form of all he missed during those precious lost days, it feels more like forever.

Anger bubbling to agitate his limbs, clamping his jaw to control a tongue wanting to verbally whip the angel over his abandonment, Dean is the first to break. Summoning some resolve of self-control with a deep inhalation, he pivots his neck to lay a kiss upon your fussing daughter’s head.

She fidgets, sensing the surfacing of fury, and clings tighter to the soft flannel collar of his shirt for both their comforts.

“It’s okay, baby girl,” the hunter whispers into the downy tufts haloing her forehead. Lowering his lashes to temper the sparks of wrath glinting in his greens, he squats to set her between his knees. Swiping a thumb at her round chin, a fond smile bending his mouth, he retrieves her dropped teddy bear and weaves it through the tiny fingers reluctant to cede their hold on him.

Castiel watches the interaction in wonderment, heavy heart lightening in gratitude for Dean’s care – the sacrifice of unconditional love the man made in the seraph’s stead. Warmth rushes the veins of his vessel, not in jealousy of their bond, but in how like you the child reacts to Dean’s reassurance. How like you she looks in that, and so many subtler ways. A twinge of regret rises to thicken the angel’s throat, tickling it with tears and threatening to wash away the kindling of serenity coursing his celestial being. He swallows hard, fighting the sorrowful sentiment. Hope is what brought him back, and it’s _who_ he’ll hold on to – if she’ll have him.

Dean unbends and casts a glower at his returned friend. Chest puffing, as yet unhealed fractures gnawing achingly at his ribs in reminder of the angel’s departing assault, he strides with intimidating intention toward the trench coat wearing statue silently shadowing the threshold.

“Dean!” Sam tries to forestall the clash he sees coming – has seen coming ever since Cas left.

Dean shrugs his brother’s brushing grasp off with a roll of the shoulder.

Archangel graces ignites in Jack’s alarmed eyes, quickly quelled by a shaking of Sam’s head – this is between the hunter and the angel. Whatever happens needs to happen, and Sam figures it’s better to have the conflict over and done straightaway so they can all move on.

Neither of them sees your daughter scamper off on Dean’s heels.

Dean stops his forward momentum, latching a vice-grip to the angel’s upper arm. Exhaled fire of breath flares his nostrils, fanning Castiel’s flesh.

“Hello, Dean.” Cas barely breathes out the greeting and drops his chin, stiffness reflexively bracing his muscles. He acts in no manner to defend himself, a conciliation for his transgressions – he believes he deserves to bear the full brunt of Dean’s rage.

Face-to-face with his fallen friend, the glower diminishes as he takes in the angel’s haggard features and depth of defeat sinking his stature. The ire encasing the hunter’s heart dissolves in forbearance – all that matters is he’s here now. They’ve lost enough and Dean won’t risk losing anymore or anyone else. “Damnit, Cas.” The bolt of his grip loosens, slides up the seraph’s arm to clasp him at the nape and yank him in for a burly hug.

It takes Cas a moment to relax, to realize he’s being welcomed. Welcomed, and _forgiven_. Understanding wets his vision; he smooths his palms to Dean’s back, squeezes, and settles a cheek on the man’s shoulder to return the affection. “I’m sorry.” Sensing Dean’s wince on account of his broken ribs, remembering when last they spoke and realizing Dean was right all along, Cas mends the injury with what little of his grace has recharged.

Clearing his throat, self-conscious of what staying close for much longer might mean about his machismo, Dean shifts the column of his body a step away.

“I’m sorry for everything,” Cas adds to be clear it’s about more than a couple of cracked ribs. “Y/N … she’s _gone_.”

“I know. We know. But you – you’re _here_.” Dean nods, voice low, “And it’s not me you need to apologize to.” Scissoring his bowed leg sideways, he inclines his angular aspect knee-ward to indicate the child concealed in the nook there peering up at him from behind the creases of denim with wide eyes of a blue hue rivaling the angel’s and gleaming with all the golden-flecked shine of your soul.

“Wh-what do I say?” Castiel’s earnest emphasis lifts to meet Dean’s amused greens.

“Everything, nothing, it doesn’t matter,” Dean’s tongue lilts at the verge of laughter. He knows the girl’s intrinsic kindness, an inherited trait of yours, and knows Cas has absolutely nothing to worry about.

“What if I say the wrong thing?” the angel worries, glancing down to where a clumsy handful of small fingers wrap around one of his dangling digits and tug.

The smile crinkling Dean’s freckled cheeks softens. “Look man, sometimes you’re gonna say the wrong thing. You’re gonna _do_ the wrong thing. She doesn’t need you to be perfect Cas, she just needs you to be there.”

She puts her entire meager weight into the tug and all but topples over sideways to get Cas going.

He follows her lead, acknowledging Sam and Jack along the way as she navigates between them, shuffling to the blanket where she discards Bear-Bear and uses the freed hand to pull at his sleeve.

He gathers he should sit, and does so; sinking into an awkward splayed leg position he manages, after some manually assisted rearranging of ankles and bending of knees to transform into a passible, if not totally comfy, cross-legged seat.

Satisfied he’s not going anywhere, she toddles to a shelf stacked with a rainbow assortment of narrow-width books – decidedly not the usual lore lining the bunker’s library walls – and returns with a yellow-covered book. She plunks it on and climbs into the cradle of his lap.

He picks up the book, turning it over in his hands to study the block-lettered title: _THE BUSY BUMBLING BEE_. He runs a fingertip over the raised outline of a bumblebee adorning the cover. The black and yellow stripes of the insect blur with the dampening of his sight – this is the book he selected for her what seems to him a lifetime ago, spine still un-cracked.

Small hands wipe at the tears glistening the angel’s unshaven cheeks. Not afflicted as he is by crippling doubt, she was waiting for him. Love lights an adoring gaze as she stares patiently into her father’s weeping eyes. She feels his pain, shares it, and also the love it arose from embedded in the core of his being. Love’s incarnate flower may have faded with your death, the beauty of the blossom withered, seeded and blown to ash, but the roots persist and in the passing, the rise of the sun persisting, there survives forever the promise of life renewed. She’s a being born in darkness, yes – one conceived of the purest most forgiving love.

“Daddy, read?” she requests, naming him, _knowing_ him without being told who he is; squirming comfortably against his chest as if they’ve sat together a thousand times before, fingers fluttering along the lapels of his coat, she sleepily snuggles.

“Of course.” Fingers trembling to flick open to the first page, too overcome by emotion to translate the text thereon, he presses a kiss into the crown of her hair. Not wanting to disappoint her, he determines he knows enough about bees to improvise. The scruff dusting his chin tickles her scalp as he speaks, “Once upon a time …”

Giggling, she revolves in his arms to look up at him – a beaming smile petals her mouth bright pink and for the first time since her birth – for the first time since the bleak day he lost you and himself – Hope smiles upon the angel.

 

_Salt water caresses your bare toes. Sprays the hem of the satin slip shrouding your figure. The water’s touch is neither cool nor warm. It’s nothing. Numb. Wake receding, footprints stamp the sand. Lapping again, lolling, they vanish. All directions, no matter in which you wander, lead to nowhere. The stretch of beach goes on in an endless bleached strand with no one around. You’ve been walking, minutes, days, hours, forever, you can’t tell. Never could tell. The sun sits there, burning low in a blazing orange sky, not quite dipping completely below the horizon. Never setting. Never rising. Always the same day – no way to know with certainty if it’s stuck at the close, or the dawn. Something niggles at you, an unsettling sensation, or perhaps, simply, the sense of being unsettled – of being trapped in limbo. You stop walking. The orange intensifies, blinding._

Summer scents of cut grass and heated pavement pervade the blue sky above. As is typical for beautifully balmy Kansas days, at the horizon, clouds congregate, oppressively increasing humidity amassing their ranks to brew a storm. Somewhere distant, a block or two closer on this pass, an ice cream truck’s song cheerily plays _Pop Goes the Weasel_. A swing’s chains squeal, links straining against one another at the peak of the arc. The girl’s braids and grin flare up in the backward momentum of breeze. Tracking her incoming impact with a palm, Castiel pushes Hope, with some force, forward again on the downswing. True to her angelic genetics, she likes to fly _high_ ; actual flight being strictly forbidden outside the confines of the bunker walls and only in an emergency. The heritably rebellious child’s definition of an emergency thus often conflicts with that of the parent.

Castiel’s blues slit, not requiring a second glance to identify the all-powerful being not so surreptitiously occupying the far bench of the playground wearing a compact one-time prophetic vessel sporting a pair of Converse, an unruly haircut, and a brick red rumpled hoodie.

Chuck, or rather, _God_ , appears utterly nonchalant at being noticed and motions in a polite wave.

Cas snags his daughter, stilling the swing to her whining chagrin and holding the chains to avoid fingers being pinched as she slides to the dusty ground. Squatting to her level, he hugs her tight, kisses her cheek, and murmurs in her ear, “There’s someone I need to speak to – go and play, stay where I can see you.” Angling back, a smile sneaks across his mouth despite his disquiet over the sudden appearance of his Father. “Who loves you most?”

“You do, daddy.” She giggles at their sentimental game. Glancing back at the stranger, the same cock of chin quirk trademarked by her father slants her expression in curiosity. “Who is he?”

“Trouble.” Cas straightens and ruffles his fingers fondly through her hair. “Now go, have fun. I’ll be watching.” He winks.

Sensing worry, she accepts the false comfort of the exaggerated blink of blue mostly for his benefit, and scurries off toward the swirling yellow slide.

Shoving his hands into his pockets, Cas strides in a direct path intersecting through the monkey bars and ducking under a bridge, all the time eying the perimeter for other dangers. It’s never good news when God shows, and as a general rule, Cas could do without his intervention. Besides, last he knew, last anyone knew, God was on permanent leave from Creation.

Chuck holds up a pacifying palm as Cas approaches. “Take it easy Castiel, I’m just here to talk.”

The angel’s eyes narrow, incredulity creeping into the corners and his husking voice, “You’re here to talk? Really? All the times I prayed, _begged_ for you to answer my calls, and you show up out of nowhere to _talk_?”

The jovial smile plastering Chuck’s bearded cheeks dies. “I know you think this is a conversation that’s long overdue and I have my reasons for waiting.”

“You always have _reasons_ ,” Cas mutters. His attention drifts to Hope climbing the ladder to the slide. He can’t help but think she has something to do with his Father’s untimely desire to _talk_. “Reasons and mysterious ways,” he adds, shooting him a surly glare.

“Am I detecting a touch of bitterness in your tone?” Chuck scoffs, clutching a hand to his chest in mock offense. Sighing, he reconsiders under the coolness of the angel’s continued scowl, “Well, I suppose it isn’t untoward.” Leaning forward, elbows on his knees, his attitude plummets to serious. “Son, _sit_.”

The _son_ is a tad too much for Cas to swallow. He sits nonetheless, mirroring the meditative pose of his Father. Hope is at the top of the platform, waiting on her turn to slide. “Why are you here now?” Cas asks, forgoing any further un-pleasantries.

In protest of the parallel, Chuck inclines backward, rests an arm across the back of the bench and lazily crosses his legs. “I’ve always had a special fondness for you. I mean, I think the multiple resurrections made that pretty clear,” he reflects.

Cas’ jaw grinds. “I came to think of them as punishments.”

“Punishment?” Chuck sneers. “Of course you’d say that, you’re, well, _you_.”

The seraph snorts an involuntary sniff of laughter and shifts his weight to the soles of his boots to stand. He has had enough of God’s games for one eternity.

A subtle gesture anchors the angel’s ungrateful ass to the wood slats. Sliding nearer, Chuck splays his fingers over Cas’ shoulder. Cas may have bowed out of the game, but God has an Ace up his sleeve left to play. “They say mankind is my most perfect creation, heck, I’ve even said that, but I think I came darn close when I created you.”

“What are you talking about?” Cas directs the question at the unwelcome grasp of fingers locking him in place.

The ringing tune of the ice cream truck wends into the adjacent parking lot. Kids fling themselves en masse off the metal and wooden play structures toward the temptation of a sugary treat. Wishing to join them to get a frozen delight, Hope looks to her father for permission. Sensing her stare, he momentarily meets her anxious gaze and nods. She bolts for the truck.

Chuck’s volume drops to a whisper for dramatic effect, “I’m talking about why you’ve never quite meshed with the other angels. Why you’re drawn to humans. Why all this hurts. So. _Much_. I designed you with the Almighty mechanics of an angel and space right here” –he prods the middle of Cas’ ribcage– “to house the boundless heart of humanity.”

Chuck is right – this conversation _is_ long overdue; and yet Cas wonders, ‘Why? Why _now_.’ He condenses the question into a single spoken, “Why?”

“Why not _now_?” He’s God, unedited or no, he gets the benefit of reading the first draft of every thought. “I’m offering you a choice, Castiel. You can stay here, wallowing in emotions you’re not equipped to handle, good and bad, for better or worse, stumbling through fatherhood – trust me, it’s hard, really _really_ hard. Or, I can take you from this tormenting place. Bring you home.”

“This is my home. You said so yourself, I don’t belong in Heaven,” Cas counters.

“This isn’t your home, Castiel. Your home, the one place you’ve known true happiness from unending toil and will know it again, is with Y/N.”

If he could recoil, he would. His vessel’s blood congeals, rushing like a freight train through his ears. He never gave up hope of one day locating your soul, but life happens. The supernatural, _happens_. And gradually, he and Sam and Dean shuffled the search to the background; spoke about it, although not you, less and less. Surely God isn’t suggesting he knows where you are and has known all along. “But she’s, her soul-”

Chuck slackens his grip, rubs the previously pinched spot almost tenderly. “Is safe. I kept her safe. A special favor for you.”

Cas leaps to his feet. Resisting the urge to pick up his Father’s vessel, his hands ball to fists at his sides. “Where is she?” he thunders, garnering the unwanted attention of several innocent passersby.

Unimpressed, Chuck sharpens a finger shrewdly skyward. “Ah ah, not so fast. You have a choice. So choose. Y/N, or this?” His palm prostrates outward at the world.

Castiel’s gaze seeks out his daughter in the cluster of children gathered at the window of the ice cream truck.

Seeing the conflict of concern darkening the seraph’s mien, Chuck magnanimously mollifies him, “Don’t you fret your handsome head about Hope. Sam and Dean will be along shortly. I’ll see that she stays safe until then.”

Castiel turns back to regard his Father, scrutinizing his face for sincerity of answer. “And if I choose to stay here, what happens to Y/N?”

Seeming earnest by Cas’ account, Chuck states, “I’ll release her soul to Heaven – to occupy that bigger on the inside cell reserved just for her in perpetuity. Of course, you’ll never see her again.”

“She’ll be happy?”

“She’ll know the same contentment and protection as any other soul in their ultimate deliverance.”

Lids shutting to stay the relieved breech of tears, the angel’s heart hurts, aches for you and will until he ceases to exist. And yet, quieting the organ with the reassurance of your peace and contentment, he breathes deep and accepts the freshened flow of pain as the cost paid for the miracle of Hope – the living embodiment of your love. She needs her father as much as he needs to be there to protect and nurture the last living remnant of you. It’s enough to know you’ll be happy. Without lifting his eyes again to his Father, Cas takes several sure-footed steps away.

Brow knotting in shock, stunned by the evident rejection, Chuck stumbles vertical, gasping, “Where are you going?”

Cas doesn’t turn. Doesn’t halt. Doesn’t dignify him with a reply. The implication of _home_ – the one he created without any help from his Father, in spite of him even – screams clear.

A laugh echoes in the recesses of God’s ribcage. He slumps onto the bench and scratches at his temple in half-frustration, a quarter bafflement, and a quarter pride.

Amara, unseen by Cas as she witnessed the unfolding events, observes from beside him, “You were wrong about the angel. He resisted temptation where Adam and Eve failed. You claimed this would prove humans were perfect in their imperfection, and yet I continue to be confused by your devotion to them given the angel’s triumph in your test.”

“Usually being wrong feels significantly less … fulfilling.” Chuck exhales.

Amara finds the idea appealing. “So sometimes being wrong is … _right_?”

“It’s not the moral of the story I expected, but yeah, I guess.” Chuck shrugs, watching with a budding smile as Cas catches up to his daughter, sweeps her up by the waist and steals a lick of her ice cream cone before she can twist it away. The whole image oozes ridiculousness because the angel can’t taste anything other than molecules, and there he is, eating ice cream for the sake of charming the child.

“What are you going to do?” Amara interrupts her brother’s ruminating.

He stows the smile. “What do you think?”

Amara answers literally, “I think he’s a far better father than you for not selfishly forsaking a child that needs him in favor of his personal happiness.”

“That-that’s not what I meant,” he stutters at the umbrage of the remark, however accurate. “I meant – what do you think _I should do_?”

“Oh-” Her lips round around the syllable. She offers no apology for stating the truth. “I think, brother, that even Noah had the wisdom to gather the creatures of your creation on his ark in twos. A lonely existence is a cruel burden to bear. Just as darkness needs light to find balance, so too does an angel need his heart. Let him be complete.”

Mainly to acknowledge the correctness contained in his sister’s estimation with a perceptible punctuation of agreement, God snaps his fingers, murmuring, “So be it.”

 

A plump droplet of rain splashes your forehead. Another hits. The drips coalesce with beads of sweat into a salty rivulet rolling along the arch of your brow. They collect – a stinging pool – in the socket of your eye.

The last thing you recall, was blinking against a brightening sky. In that sea of orange, the sun, no longer still, ascended higher, well above the bend of horizon. You sat then, thighs sinking into soft sand, the silken shift of your dress sticking translucent to skin. Watching, waiting, the tide surged in a white-capped wave, then steadily retreated. Seeing the promising signs of daybreak, you laid your body back, limbs lax, letting the simmering sun revive numbed senses.

The horn of a semi-truck blares, rattling to bone. The sound seizes you, driving your recumbent and soaking wet body upright in a shiver of adrenaline. Huddled at highway’s edge, heart bounding in your throat, eyes blinking and wide, you peer wildly around at the overcast grey matte of stormy summer sky. Your focus centers on the green sign blessedly marking the nearest exit: Lebanon, 1 mile. It may as well read: _Hope, home._

Not questioning the how, or who, or why, you look between the unshod soles of your bare feet and the black asphalt, and you rise.


End file.
